


We Will Not Sleep, But We Will Be Changed

by sneaqui



Series: How will the dead be raised? [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel 616, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: AIDS crisis, Aftermath of Torture, Body Dysphoria, Body Horror, C-PTSD, Depersonalization, Depression, Dissociation, HIV/AIDS, M/M, Needles, Non-Consensual Body Modification, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Panic Attacks, Period-Typical Homophobia, Period-Typical Racism, Police Brutality, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Torture, Racebent Peggy Carter, References to Child Abduction, References to Torture of a Minor, Seizures, Steve Rogers as the Winter Soldier, Too Many 616 Cameos, Torture, Torture performed by a main character, mention of rape, mention of suicide
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-12
Updated: 2018-01-22
Packaged: 2018-05-19 23:32:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 54,717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5984620
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sneaqui/pseuds/sneaqui
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“I can tell by your reaction to my question that you want to go very badly,” Mr. Erskine says. “Why is that?”</i>
</p><p>
  <i>Steve takes a deep breath and says, “I want to serve. If all I’m good for is giving my time instead of my life, then so be it. I can find a way to live with that. But I can’t do nothing.”</i>
</p><p>
  <i>Mr. Erskine smiles, warm and honest, and leans back in his chair. “A very inspiring speech, Mr. Rogers,” he says.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>“Thanks. I practiced it in front of the mirror."</i>
</p><p>An AU in which:<br/>- There is no Project Rebirth. Instead, Steve goes overseas as a USO volunteer.<br/>- Steve is given the serum by Zola.<br/>- Steve is turned into an assassin by Zola and the Soviets, and Bucky becomes one of the first Avengers.</p><p>Non-canon-compliant but still follows the same World War II-centric timeline.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is about 80% complete. I’ll be posting a chapter every couple of weeks to give myself time to write more and edit the other chapters.
> 
> I've covered all of the major warnings, but I might add more specific ones when we get to chapters 5 and 6. If there are any that you think should be added, please let me know!
> 
> Much love to [alcibiades](http://archiveofourown.org/users/alcibiades/pseuds/alcibiades) for beta-ing <3

_"That you Captain? Sure,_  
_sure I remember–I still hear you_  
_lecturing at me on the intercom, 'Keep your guns up, Burnsie!'_  
_and then screaming, 'Stop shooting, for crissake, Burnsie,_  
_those are friendlies!' But crissake, Captain,_  
_I'd already started..._

_It was only_  
_that I loved the sound_  
_of them. I guess I just loved_  
_the feel of them sparkin' off my hands... "_

\- "The Dead Shall Be Raised Incorruptible” by Galway Kinnell

**Brooklyn - May, 1942**

Bucky pulls himself up the Court Street stop stairs one at a time, clutching the railing like an old man, his arms and legs trembling with fatigue. A steady stream of commuters on their way home from work rushes past on his left; a couple of suits knock into him and don’t even bother to apologize.

Bucky’s always beat after his ten hour shift on Mondays. All he wants is to go home, eat, and listen to the ballgame. Put his head or his feet in Steve’s lap and bitch about his day so that Steve can make smart aleck comments about what Bucky should or shouldn’t have done.

Bucky’s just reached the top of the stairs when he spots the man in question, darting across Court Street right in front of a trolley car. Bucky’s body’s reaction to seeing Steve always catches him off guard -- the way his heart kicks against his chest, like an engine turning over.

He’s also caught of guard by the sight of Steve out of the house. Steve’s supposed to be resting on the one day of the week that he’s not working at either the automat or Loeser’s.

Instead of calling out, Bucky decides to follow him, ducking through the crowd to get behind Steve as he strides down Clinton Street. Steve’s easy to spot with his hunched shoulders and his head of downy blond hair, but he’s tough to follow; he shoulders through the slim spaces in between people where Bucky can’t go.

Bucky quickens his steps and starts to gain on Steve when they reach their block. Bucky jogs up their stoop, weaving through the brood of children perched there, and darts through the front door of their building just before it shuts behind Steve.

He waits until he hears Steve fumbling with the lock on their apartment door, and then he dashes up the stairs, grabs Steve by the hipbones, and growls into his good ear in Lauren Bacall’s throaty timbre, “You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve?”

Steve whirls around, back slamming their apartment door and causing it to at last unstick and wobble open.

Bucky winces in sympathetic pain; that can’t have been kind to Steve’s back. He’s about to apologize when he spots the sheet of paper that fluttered out of Steve’s jacket pocket when he yanked his hands out in self-defense.

Bucky snatches the paper off the floor before Steve can, and immediately he knows what it is. The shape of the card, the texture and weight of the paper, the embossing of the hammered letters. He’d know it blind: an Army registration card.

“Buck--” Steve tries.

“You tried to enlist again.” The words come out of Bucky’s mouth flat and toneless. His eyes finally focus on the actual content of Steve’s neat, block lettering, trying to understand how-- and there it is. Under ‘Place of Birth’: Boston. And then Bucky’s hissing, mad as an alley cat, “Boston? _Boston_? What the fuck is this, Steve?”

Steve doesn’t have to stand on his toes or puff his chest out to be intimidating. He looks Bucky square in the face and says, voice deep and steady, “It’s exactly what it looks like.”

Bucky steps further into Steve’s space, their faces inches apart now. “Steve, you could get arrested,” he pleads.

“I know,” Steve says, unmoved.

Bucky realizes in that moment something that he should have much sooner. “You’re gonna do it again,” he says.

Steve’s silence and steady gaze are answer enough.

Bucky wants to scream, wants to argue until Steve sees sense, but starting a fight with Steve is giving him a home field advantage. Instead, he takes a deep breath, tosses Steve’s registration card onto the counter, and steps around him to get to their kitchen sink. He needs to wash up; his arms are tacky with melted sugar from the refinery.

“You gonna tell me I can’t?” Steve says, to his back.

Bucky peels his shirt off over his head, plugs up the sink and starts to run the water. “God help the man that tells you you can’t do anything, Steve,” he says, calm as he can stand.

Bucky grabs their thin bar of soap, lathers it up rough and quick between his palms, and scrubs up his arms and into his armpits.

When he doesn’t say anything more, Steve hedges, “We’ve lost thousands of men, Buck. And we’re not even in Europe yet. If there’s any chance that I could--”

Bucky whips his head up from where he’s bent it under the running faucet. “But you can’t. This isn’t Goldie’s, Steve. You mess up, the worst you’ll get won’t be me razzing you. You mess up over there--”

“And I’ll die,” Steve snaps as he shoulders past Bucky on his way to their living room, knocking him sideways. “I take a _breath_ at the wrong time, and I’ll die, Buck.”

Steve keeps his back to Bucky as he slides out of his jacket, hangs it up on the wire they’ve strung across their interior window. “Hell, a bad scare could kill me. Didn’t stop you from sneaking up on me before.”

“Oh, I’m supposed to treat you like you’re made of glass, now?” Bucky scoffs.

“I’m just saying, if you’re so worried about me, then maybe you should be a little more careful in the future.” Steve rolls up his shirtsleeves and walks back into the kitchen to look into their icebox. “Shouldn’t sneak up on a fella with a bad heart like that, Buck. Could’a laid me right out. And then where would you be?”

The guilt-tripping punk. “With one less mouth to feed,” Bucky grumbles. He combs his hair back out of his face with his fingers, grabs a dish rag, and starts to rub it dry.

“You’d miss my mouth,” Steve says.

“Only when you make good use of it.”

Steve snorts and throws the sausages he’s found in the icebox onto the counter. “You keep telling yourself that, pal,” he says as he reaches up to root through the canned goods on the shelf above the sink.

“Steve,” Bucky says, not meaning for it to come out as soft as it does. Steve looks over his shoulder, wary. But this is something that Steve needs to know and deserves to hear. If Bucky’s going to be called a sap for saying it, so be it. “You got so much more to offer the world than just fighting,” he tells Steve.

Steve smiles tightly, shakes his head and says, “Sure, Buck.” He grabs the dish rag out of Bucky’s hand and says, “Get that out of your dirty hair. We dry dishes with those. There’s a clean towel on the clothes horse.”

They spend the night in, listening to the ballgame. Their radio is on the fritz, and it’s gonna be awhile before they can afford to get it fixed. But their next door neighbor, Mrs. Posen, is nice enough to turn hers up a bit louder whenever the Dodgers are playing. Steve sketches Bucky’s feet (“Work on your hands. When’s anyone gonna pay you to draw feet?”) while Bucky attempts to make a dent in the Sunday Times crossword puzzle.

“‘Man called, but not yet chosen.’” Bucky reads. “S-T-E-V- nope. It’s six letters. Looks like you’re too short again.” He gets an open-palmed smack on the back of the head for that one.

What follows is a tussle, which turns into necking, which ends in Steve and Bucky rutting naked and uncovered on Steve's sunken mattress. They share his bed in the summer months so they can sleep beneath the apartment’s only window. It’s mid-May and already the heat is starting to rise up from the asphalt and sink into the bricks, where it will linger until September.

Bucky tries desperately to roll his hips just right without jostling the squeaky bed frame too much, one hand cradling Steve’s head and the other squeezing his ass. Reminding Steve that a body’s good for more than just fighting, that his body makes Bucky feel good, so damn good. All that pale skin, soft and yielding under Bucky’s rough hands. The hard bones underneath that skin, seemingly unbreakable, that push up against Bucky as Steve gasps and rides his rhythm.

“Yeah, Steve, c’mon,” Bucky pants into the wet hair at Steve’s temple, “C’mon, baby.”

“Dancing-- _fuck._ Dancing as fast as I can, Buck,” Steve gasps from where he’s curled up into Bucky’s chest, his lips pulling on the skin of Bucky’s neck as he speaks. His hands slide down Bucky’s back to clutch and knead the rise of Bucky’s ass, and then, one of his long, devil fingers slides down between Bucky’s crack to rub at his asshole.

Bucky gasps and his dick pulses and leaks where it rubs against Steve’s. “ _Fuck_. Fighting dirty, Rogers,” he laughs, ducking his head down to kiss the small, pink nub of Steve’s nipple.

“Always,” Steve affirms, and then when Bucky closes his lips around his nipple and sucks with the intent of bruising it, he says, softer, “Shit, Bucky, always.”

Steve’s finger slips out of Bucky’s crack, and Bucky moans with the loss until Steve pushes his chest up into Bucky’s mouth and grabs him by the roots of his hair to keep him in place. His breath comes out of his throat in sharp pants, matching the rhythm of his hips as they piston up against Bucky’s seemingly of their own accord.

Bucky presses his forehead to Steve’s sternum, gasping and grinning at being able to fuck Steve out of his own head. He grabs Steve’s thighs and wraps them around his hips, wanting him closer. He rolls his hips in counterpoint to Steve’s, dicks sliding against each other and through the filthy mix of sweat and pre-ejaculate that coats their bellies.

Bucky’s brain and his balls tingle, and his body’s about to lock up when he hears Steve whimper, “Coming. I’m coming, Buck.” Bucky groans and locks his arm around Steve’s shoulders to pull him closer, fucking Steve as hard and as fast as his exhausted body will allow.

Steve cries into his ear as his dick stiffens and spills against Bucky’s, and Bucky pushes his dick into the sweet slick of Steve’s come and follows him over.

He gasps and laughs into Steve’s clammy skin, -- because he always laughs like a jackass when he comes -- “Fuck, Steve. Fuck, yeah.” He feels Steve’s arms encircling him and kisses being pressed into his hair as he trembles through the last of it, humming and chuckling. His fits don’t always last this long, but there’s something about doing this with Steve, coming with Steve.

He looks down at Steve with bleary eyes and a stupid smile on his face to see Steve grinning up at him.

“Kiss me,” Steve says, and Bucky does. He kisses Steve long and lazy and wet until Steve pushes him away with sloppy hands and mumbles, eyes closed and drifting towards sleep, “Go get us something to clean up.”

Bucky snorts and rolls out of bed. “Well, since you asked so nicely.”

“I’m small and frail. Don’t want me to hurt myself, do you, Buck?”

“Ha,” Bucky says as he grabs a rag and wipes his belly clean. He wets it to bring back to Steve, and before he leaves the kitchen, he fills a pot with water and puts it on to boil.

“Buck, c’mon,” Steve grouses when he sees what Bucky’s doing. “I’m fine. I just need a good night’s sleep, that’s all.”

"You're not fine,” Bucky says as he sits on the edge of the bed to clean Steve up. “Your back always cramps up after we screw around.” He smacks Steve on the thigh. “C’mon. On your front.”

He fills up a hot water bottle and presses it between Steve’s shoulder blades, moving it down in increments as he rubs Steve’s back from top to bottom.

Steve falls asleep as he does it, snoring to beat the band.

Bucky smiles and brushes Steve’s hair out of his face, out of its natural part just so he’ll get to see Steve frown and futz with it in the morning.

Bucky will miss him like hell when he’s gone. But it’ll be good for Steve to have Bucky out of his hair. He’ll have the place to himself. Maybe he’ll even find himself a girl over the summer.

Bucky puts his thoughts aside for the night. He curls up along Steve’s back, tucks his face into his neck.

-

Bucky leaves for basic training less than three weeks later.

Connie Soffel, a hipster dame in Steve’s figure drawing class, humors Steve through two weeks of moping before she finally snaps, “Kid, you’re killin’ me. You need something to keep your mind occupied. Why don’t you volunteer for the USO or somethin’?”

“Don’t think I’m really arm candy material, Con,” Steve says, frowning at his canvas. Bucky’s right: he does need to work on his hands.

“You don’t gotta be a girl to join the USO,” Connie says. “Bob Hope’s not a girl. He’s been doing shows for the troops out in California. And my friend’s uncle is overseas right now. He used to work in the theater, doing sound. Now he’s doing it for the USO shows.”

Steve’s head snaps up. “He’s overseas?”

“Yup,” says Connie, smirking.

It’s too good an opportunity for Steve worry about his pride. “Are there USO offices in New York?” he asks her.

She laughs. “You Brooklyn boys don’t know a thing about the city, do you? It’s smack dab in the middle of Times Square. Broadway at 47th. Can’t miss it.”

Steve goes back into the city after work that evening, and true to Connie’s word, the USO offices are right there in the middle of Times Square, behind a giant red, white, and blue billboard for Pepsi-Cola.

Steve marches through the front door and freezes, suddenly surrounded by dozens of servicemen in uniform, chatting and playing cards and reading newspapers. Several of them turn to look at Steve, take note of his lack of uniform and relative size, and turn right back around, uninterested. Steve grits his teeth and moves forward through the crowd.

He sneaks through a door in the back corner of the room that leads to a small hallway. He walks past a USO girl carrying a couple of board games, a middle aged woman with kind eyes speaking in hushed tones to a hollow-eyed serviceman. He keeps his head down and neither of them pay him any attention.

At the end of the hallway he finds what he’s looking for: a door stenciled with the word ‘Offices’ on its pebbled glass.

He steps through it and almost trips over a rolled-up projection screen, shoved up against the baseboard to the left of the doorway. When he hops to the right to avoid it, the back of the door slams into a stack of boxes and bounces back toward him. He grabs the door handle and freezes, takes a moment to take in his surroundings before he trips over or walks into anything else.

This hallway, in contrast to the quiet and orderly one before it, is filled with the jangling din of panicked voices and ringing phones. People stride back and forth across it, out of one office and into another, like in a Warner Brothers cartoon.

There are stacks of boxes lining the walls wherever they’re not occupied by a doorway. What looks to be some audio equipment, a record player, a couple of microphone stands. Any free surface is littered with stacks of flyers, rolls of butcher paper, empty soda bottles.

Steve steps around a tower of boxes to poke his head into an office and is nearly knocked flat by a harried-looking young guy. “Holy--” the guy jumps back in surprise, and stares at Steve, confused. “Who are you?”

“I’m--” Steve clears his throat, “My name is Steve Rogers. I’d like to volunteer.”

The guy looks a bit frustrated by Steve’s answer. “Okay. Well, um. Let me get you a application form--” He trails off and starts to walk away.

Steve’s not sure if he’s supposed to wait there or follow him. He opts to follow, saying to the guy’s back, raising his voice to be heard above the noise, “I’d like to talk to someone about volunteering overseas. I know the USO has been putting on shows-"

The guy turns around, suddenly interested, “You have experience working in the theater?”

“Well, I do go to the pictures a lot,” Steve says, attempting a joke.

The guy stares. “I’m assuming that’s a ‘no.’”

“Yeah, that’s a ‘no.’”

“Any experience with film or audio equipment?”

“No.”

“Any construction experience?”

“No.”

The guy clenches his eyes shut and sighs. “Look kid, I’m sorry, but we’re really looking for men who can-”

“I’m an artist.” Steve refuses to walk out of here with another ‘No’ ringing in his ears. There has to be something he can do, or at least something he can convince them he can do. “I draw. I paint. I did some work for the WPA for a couple of years. I can make flyers, banners--”

“We don’t really need anybody--”

“I’m a fast learner. And, hell, it doesn’t take muscles to hammer a nail--”

“Kid, we’ve got plenty of guys to hammer nails.”

“Stop calling me ‘kid,’” Steve growls. He’s probably five or six years older than this guy and has been through twice as much shit in his lifetime. Even if he’s rejected, he sure as hell won’t be talked down to.

“Are you trying to start a fight with one of my volunteers?” says a voice from behind Steve.

Steve spins around to see an older gentleman clutching two huge sheafs of papers, one in each arm. His greying hair, his eyebrows, and his tie are all in disarray, looking like they’ve been pulled at and not put back into place. He stares at Steve, awaiting an answer, gaze authoritative but not unkind.

Steve opens his mouth to make an excuse, but finds he can’t. Because he was; he was about to start a fight.

“I was just telling Steven here about our application process,” the young guy cuts in. “I’m not sure that he has the qualifications--”

“Noah, why don’t you take these and bring them to Margaret and Anita’s office?” The older gentleman steps forward and passes one of the sheafs of paper into his arms.

Noah takes it and nods, obeying the man without question. “Yes, Mr. Erskine,” he says and rushes down the hall.

 Mr. Erskine turns his attention back to Steve and gives him a brief once-over. “4E?” he asks.

Steve takes a deep breath and says, “4F.” And it feels good to state it as a fact, not a social marker. Mr. Erskine’s not a dame who’ll cringe and then try to hide it behind a weak smile. He’s not one of the fellas on the block who thinks that being unfit for service makes Steve fair game.

Mr. Erskine nods and says, almost sad, “We may get to that point yet.” And then he smiles, quick and sly, and loads the sheaf of papers he’s been holding into Steve’s unready arms. “First, bring those down the hall to Margaret and Anita. Office number three. Then, there are one or two boxes that need to be brought up from the basement. Anita will show you where they are.”

One or two boxes turn out to be seven, a couple as heavy as Steve is. Those he pushes up the steps one at a time, raising plumes of dust that go straight into his lungs. By the time he gets to the last box, his back is twinging, and he can’t bend over to push it down the hall.

He plants the flat of his foot on the side of the box and puts all of his weight behind it to slide it forward a couple of inches. He does it over and over again, gritting his teeth and keeping his head down so that he doesn’t have to see the way people stare at him every time he slides past an open office door.

He gets all the boxes stacked up outside of Margaret and Anita’s office, and then walks a crooked line to Mr. Erskine’s office, sweating and wheezing.

Mr. Erskine looks up as Steve stumbles through his door. “How do you feel?” he asks Steve.

Steve is tempted to collapse into the chair opposite Mr. Erskine’s desk, but forces himself to stay standing. “Was that a test?” he asks.

“Yes,” Mr. Erskine says without hesitation.

“Then. I feel great,” Steve says.

Mr. Erskine chuckles and gestures to the chair, which Steve lowers himself into gingerly. Mr. Erskine folds his hands together and looks across his desk at Steve. “For now, you will be working on Mondays and Wednesdays in the early evenings, after work. Is that acceptable to you?”

Steve sits up straighter in his chair. “Yes, sir.”

“You will be working out of these offices for the foreseeable future.” Mr. Erskine pauses and taps the knuckles of his joined hands on the desk as he thinks. “But what you really want is to go overseas. Is that correct?”

“Yes, sir,” he answers.

“I can tell by your reaction to my question that you want to go very badly. Why is that?”

Steve takes a deep breath and says, “I want to serve. If all I’m good for is giving my time instead of my life, then so be it. I can find a way to live with that. But I can’t do nothing.”

Mr. Erskine smiles, warm and honest, and leans back in his chair. “A very inspiring speech, Mr. Rogers,” he says.

“Thanks. I practiced it in front of the mirror.”

Mr. Erskine chuckles and says, “I can’t promise you a position overseas. But do well here, and I might be able to offer you a chance.”

The possibility of a chance is all Steve needs. “I’ll take it,” he says, smiling.

-

Bucky comes home from Fort Dix three weeks later with a straight spine, ten pound bags under his eyes, and a haircut that nearly causes Steve to bust out laughing in the middle of the train station. Steve’s seen a lot of fellas suited to the high and tight, but Bucky isn’t one of them.

Bucky must notice the way Steve keeps ducking his head and coughing to hide it, because as soon as they have their arms wrapped around each other in a friendly hug, Bucky whispers into Steve’s ear, “Don’t you say it.”

Steve keeps his mouth shut but can’t help the way his shoulders shake. “Sorry, Buck. It’s just a lot of forehead to take in.”

Bucky gives Steve a playful shove, and Steve goes with it, stumbling backwards and laughing.

They take the trolley to Bucky’s folks’ apartment and Bucky talks Steve’s ear off the whole way there despite how exhausted he looks and probably is. He talks about the fellas he’s met like they’ve been friends since childhood. He tries to tell Steve exactly what he’s been through, but gets frustrated and ends most of his stories with, “It’s kinda hard to describe.”

Mostly, he talks about food.

“What they do to spaghetti in those places doesn’t deserve to be repeated. The yokels were lappin’ it up, but--” He has a distant, horrified look in his eyes. “Geez, Steve, you can’t even imagine.”

“You wanna go to Coney Island on Thursday? I want clams.”

“You think we have time to stop at a watermelon cart before we go to my folk’s house? It’s hot enough. They’re probably out.”

Steve stays for dinner with Bucky’s ma and his siblings. Bucky’s pa is working the night shift at the docks, so he’s not there. George is a physically-broken-down, taciturn man who constantly demands silence from his wife and children. Steve’s only ever invited to dinner when he’s not there, and for that Steve’s grateful.

In George’s absence, Bucky’s ma lets loose her gift of gab. Bucky may get his looks from his pa, but he gets his charm from his ma. For every story that Bucky has tells about basic, she has one about George’s or her brother’s time in the service.

The twins, Betty and Bea, are seventeen and would probably rather be somewhere else on a summer night. They roll their eyes at their mom’s stories and gossip to each other under their breaths.

Becca, Bucky’s youngest sibling and the one to whom he’s closest, is mostly silent throughout dinner. She stabs at her chicken livers and works her jaw so hard that her mouth hangs open, furious that Bucky’s run off and left her to join the Army. As soon as dinner’s over, Bucky swoops her up into his arms and throws her over his shoulder, tickles her until she giggles like a little girl, kicking her feet into his stomach.

Steve leaves Bucky to spend the next couple of days with his family. He’ll have the day with Bucky on Thursday before he leaves, and that’s fine. Steve can’t afford to take time off from either of his jobs anyway. Not when he’s so often sick or in too much pain to work.

Steve comes home from volunteering at the USO on Wednesday night to find Bucky passed out on their bed. Everything Steve was going to do as soon as he got home is forgotten at the sight of Bucky, his face mashed into Steve’s pillow, his big lips parted and probably drooling all over it.

Steve smiles and sets his knapsack down gently at the entrance to the living room. He creeps over to the bed, fingers poised to flick Bucky’s ear. He’s inches away when he catches sight of the corner of the mattress, sheets folded over and tucked neatly underneath it. His gaze jumps to the three remaining corners to see that they’re all tucked in like that. The top sheet is even folded over his ma’s old quilt.

“Quit staring, will ya? You’re giving me the heebie jeebies,” Bucky mumbles, now awake.

“You made the bed,” Steve mutters. He turns around to get a look at the apartment, an uncanny feeling creeping up his spine. The pencils and loose pieces of paper that he sketches on are all collected neatly on top of his dresser. His clothes are all hung up. And he could swear the interior windows have been wiped down. “Buck, did you clean?”

Bucky’s still lying down, eyes closed like he’d go back to sleep if Steve would just let him. He shrugs. “It was messy.”

Steve plops his ass down onto the bed and starts to untie his shoes. “A year and a half of me nagging you and it finally took the Army to turn you into the perfect housewife.”

“Either get in this bed with me or let me sleep,” Bucky grumbles, “And, seriously, why are you complaining?”

“We’re gonna clean Hitler into submission,” Steve continues, endlessly amused by this turn of events. “I’ll bet he’s shaking in his boots.” Steve toes off his shoes and shoves Bucky over so he can lie down next to him.

"Can't kill Krauts with a gummed-up rifle," Bucky says.

Steve turns to face him. He instinctively reaches out to push Bucky’s hair out of his eyes before he remembers there’s nothing there to push back. His hand hangs there for a moment before he lets it fall to pick at a loose thread on the quilt. "Listen to you,” he says “You're really in the Army now, aren't you?"

Bucky looks across the mattress at Steve, not really seeing him, thoughts behind his eyes that he’s not speaking. He takes a deep breath and says, "Six weeks feels like a long time ago. I don't think I am who I was, Steve."

Steve shrugs. "No one ever is."

Bucky nods and turns away from Steve and onto his back, runs a hand over his face.

Steve shifts onto his left side with the intent of getting up and out of bed, leaving Bucky alone with his thoughts. But he finds that he can’t move; all the blood has drained out of his extremities and his feet are numb.

If either of them had any sense they would let it end now. They’re not kids anymore, and it’s time they started thinking about the future. Now that Bucky’s in the army and going overseas, he’s an initiate into the wider world. He’s got his whole life ahead of him. He needs to be focusing on that, and Steve needs to do the same for himself.

Steve clenches his hands into fists hard enough to dig his nails into his palms, breathes around the urge to vomit.

Bucky shifts behind him, and then one big warm hand closes around Steve’s hip and pushes him onto his back.

Steve sucks in a sudden breath, lungs hitching.

Bucky slides his palm under Steve’s shirt and lifts it up to stare at his belly with hooded eyes. He bends down and presses soft, slow kisses to it, the sound of his lips pulling on Steve’s skin loud in the quiet room.

Steve grabs Bucky’s chin to tilt his head up and look into his eyes. He won’t do this if Bucky’s just doing it out of some misplaced sense of obligation.

Bucky just peers up at Steve from under his eyebrows, smiles warmly, and says, voice low and rumbling. “I let my folks know I’m staying here. We got all night.” He nibbles on Steve’s thumb, his palm, the thin skin of his wrist. “I know you’re probably hungry after work. We can eat soon.” He tips open the buttons on Steve’s shirt, pushes it back, and skims his hands over Steve’s ribs. “At some point.” He unbuttons Steve’s pants. “Maybe in a coupla hours.”

There’s a delicate quality to Bucky’s movements that Steve doesn’t quite understand but doesn’t want to disturb. In a deviation from their routine, he follows Bucky’s lead, twisting his hips out of his pants and underwear as Bucky pulls them off, opening his legs so that Bucky can bury his head between them.

Bucky rubs his cheek against the ticklish insides of Steve’s thighs, burrows his face into the skin below Steve’s balls and rubs it with his tongue. He pulls Steve’s balls into his mouth and buries his nose in the curls around the base of Steve’s dick.

Steve feels like he’s gonna blow and Bucky hasn’t even touched his dick. “Fuck, Bucky,” Steve pants.

Bucky looks up, pulls one of Steve’s short hairs out of his mouth. “Everything alright?” he asks, hand coming up to rest on Steve’s chest to check his breathing.

“Did I say ‘stop’?” Steve damn near yells.

Bucky grins. He bends back down, and closes his lips around the tip of Steve’s dick, sucking gently and running his tongue along the edge of Steve’s foreskin.

Steve curses and grabs at Bucky, frustrated when he realizes that Bucky’s still wearing his shirt and that his hair is too short to grab onto. Bucky grumbles, obviously annoyed at Steve’s displeasure and the absence of Steve’s hands on his skin. He sits up and quickly pulls off his shirt, dog tags jingling as they fall and resettle on his chest. He shimmies back down to his spot between Steve’s thighs, takes Steve’s hands, and places one on his shoulder and the other at the top of his head where his hair is longest.

Bucky spits into his palm and moves Steve’s foreskin down his shaft, gently, before closing his mouth around Steve’s dick and sliding down.

Steve holds on tight, clutching at Bucky’s shoulder and his scalp as Bucky bobs up and down on his dick, loud and sloppy. Spit slides slides down Steve’s shaft and onto his balls, tickling and making him shiver.

At some point Steve feels Bucky shift and hears the slide of fabric on skin. He looks down to see Bucky jerking his own dick, hard and jumping in his fist just from sucking Steve.

Steve groans and involuntarily thrusts up into Bucky’s mouth. And before he can stop himself from doing it again, Bucky hums and bobs up and down on Steve’s dick faster, pulls Steve’s hips up towards his mouth.

Steve forces his eyes open so that he can watch Bucky’s face -- sweat dampening his hair at his temples and his expression peaceful -- as he fucks up into the warm, easy slide of Bucky’s mouth. His gut and his balls clench up, and he bites his lips closed and breathes out through his nose to keep from screaming as he comes down Bucky’s throat, body bowing forward and hands gripping Bucky’s ears.

Through the roaring in his ears, he hears Bucky cry out softly and then start to chuckle -- as he always does -- when he comes, face buried in the crease between Steve’s dick and thigh.

Steve scratches Bucky’s scalp while they both breathe through the come down.

At some point, Bucky asks, “You’re not mad at me?”

Steve manages to pull his head up enough to look down at him. “Why would I be mad at you?”

Bucky looks up at him blearily. “For going when you can’t.”

“No,” Steve answers immediately. He’s almost mad that Bucky would even ask that. He would never begrudge Bucky his chance to fight.

Bucky nods, looking unconvinced.

Steve decides to take this opportunity to tell Bucky something that he hasn’t yet, for a couple reasons: joining the USO isn’t the most honorable way for a man to get himself sent overseas, and Steve’s not oblivious enough to not realize that Bucky’s scared shitless of him going where the fighting’s happening.

“I joined the USO,” Steve tells him.

Bucky’s smile is wide and delighted. He props himself up on his elbows and looks up at Steve. “Steve. That’s great.”

“Yeah?” Steve asks, wary.

“Of course it is.” Bucky grabs Steve’s hand and squeezes it. “That’s a real swell thing to do, Steve. I’m really proud of you.”

Steve cups Bucky’s face in his palm for a moment, and then he shoves it away, laughing as Bucky sputters. Bucky knows how much his admiration means to Steve; no need to get all sappy about it.

They do go out, eventually. Bucky puts on his uniform and Steve puts on a tie and they take the subway all the way up to Minton’s in Harlem so that Bucky can hear something called ‘bebop’ jazz. To Steve, it sounds like music being played by someone who’s lost control of their hands, but Bucky seems to enjoy it, bobs his head and grooves to it along with everyone else.

No one’s dancing in partners, so it’s a nice change of pace for Steve. He observes closely so he can draw the scene later. Tables crammed with black and white hipsters snapping and shouting encouragements when the music really builds. The horn and the drummer’s cymbal twin flashing lights in the dark of the club. The sweat pouring off the musician’s bodies glowing orange and blue under the lights. Steve smiles, feeling lucky; those are two colors he knows for sure he can see accurately.

Both he and Bucky get completely sauced. Steve accidentally drinks the entirety of a cocktail called the Devil’s Tail that Bucky buys for them to share. He’s so caught up in the music and the sights that he doesn’t notice that Bucky went and bought his own when he wasn’t paying attention.

They’re almost home, somewhere on Court or State Street around midnight, when they get into a fight about something stupid and start to go at each other right there in the middle of the street.

“Hey! Break it up!” someone yells, and they both freeze. They look up from where they’ve got their heads bent down under each other’s arms to see a familiar face: Officer Scarsella. He’s been walking this beat since before Steve and Bucky were born.

They both pull away from each other and straighten up. “Good evening, Officer!” Bucky enthuses, tipsy and too loud.

“Barnes. Rogers,” Officer Scarsella says, looking from one of them to the other. He steps forward to take a closer look at them and sneers. “Are you boys drunk?”

Steve looks over at Bucky as they both open their mouths to respond. And then they both turn and beat it as fast as they can down the street. Officer Scarsella isn’t as young as he used to be; he doesn’t give chase, just yells after them, “No good punks! Your family’s gonna hear about this, Barnes!”

Steve and Bucky just keep running, looking across at each other and laughing. The wind in their hair, the bricks of Brooklyn whizzing past them.

-

Bucky leaves on Friday morning, off to Fort Benning for additional training. He’ll be gone about three months, and doesn’t know if he’ll be back before shipping out.

Steve waits eagerly, but finally hears from Bucky in just seven words:

NOT COMING HOME I’LL WRITE YOURS BUCKY

Steve runs his thumb over the second to last word, and then tucks the telegram into Bucky’s copy of Out of the Silent Planet. It’s sitting on the floor next to his bed; he’s been meaning to read it.

Steve hangs up his jacket and gets to work making himself dinner.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I tried to stay as historically-accurate as possible with this, but there's at least one anachronism in here that I know of. Spot it, and I will send you a million internet hugs and a one dollar check in the mail.
> 
> Some meta posts I read while researching this fic:  
> [Mr. Rogers' Gaybourhood](http://thingswithwings.dreamwidth.org/213805.html)  
> [The World of Steve Rogers in the 1940s](http://flarechaser.tumblr.com/post/104183621656/the-world-of-steve-rogers-in-the-1940s)  
> [Steve Rogers' living arrangements](http://historicallyaccuratesteve.tumblr.com/post/109231371791/i-should-be-working-but-instead-i-am-thinking)  
> [The life and times of Sergeant James 'Bucky' Barnes](http://historicallyaccuratesteve.tumblr.com/post/92756192063/the-life-and-times-of-sergeant-james-bucky)  
> I didn't directly reference any of them, but they were so helpful when planning and writing this fic. Y’all are amazing for writing these. <3
> 
> ETA: [Come talk shit about superheroes with me on tumblr](http://sneaqui.tumblr.com/). I have years of experience but too few people to commiserate with.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _I’ve done a bad thing, Steve. It’s nothing that any man wouldn’t do in my situation. It’s nothing thousands of men all over the world aren’t doing right now. But that doesn’t make it good. I’ve done a bad thing, and I wish you were here to yell at me for doing it. God, I miss fighting with you._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who has kudos-ed and commented so far. May you all receive blessings in the form of cash money.
> 
> Mouse over German text at the end for English translation.
> 
> As always, thanks to [alcibiades](http://archiveofourown.org/users/alcibiades/pseuds/alcibiades) for beta-ing!

_My tongue goes to the Secretary of the Dead_  
_to tell the corpses, "I'm sorry, fellows,_  
_the killing was just one of those things_  
_difficult to pre-visualize–like a cow,_  
_say, getting hit by lightning."_

\- “The Dead Shall be Raised Incorruptible” by Galway Kinnell

 

**The coast of Algeria - November, 1942**

Bucky curls up behind the bank of beach grass that he and his squad have cut down and built up into a defensive wall. A little blue bird rifles through the grass at his feet, paying him no attention. The sky rushes by above him, clouds moving faster than he’s ever seen them move. The sea here is mean, makes the Atlantic look calm as a bathtub. Regularly, and without warning, it lashes cold rain down on them, leaving their uniforms heavy and chafing.

The sun’s coming up. He hasn’t slept. His rifle is cradled to his chest and the barrel knocks into his jaw whenever another shaking fit wracks his body. His back, his hips, and his knees hurt from the tremors that overtake him whenever he tries to sleep.

The man -- boy, really -- he killed three days ago probably wasn’t the first one he’s killed. But he was the first man Bucky had killed up close. They were close enough for bayonets, concealed by a cover of sand and artillery smoke. They were damn lucky, is what they were; the wind was on their side, blowing it in the Germans’ faces instead of off into the sky.

Bucky thinks of the surprise on the kid’s face, shocked that Bucky would go ahead and do such a thing. Bucky wishes he’d had the wherewithal to scream in his face, “What the fuck did you think was gonna happen, you dumb schmuck?”

The kid’s still there, burned behind Bucky’s eyelids. His eyes big and human and hurting. His mouth dropping open to let out a wet, retching sound. He wouldn’t come off of Bucky’s bayonet. Bucky had to put a boot to his chest to push him off.

Bucky writes in his letter to Steve,

_I’ve done a bad thing, Steve. It’s nothing that any man wouldn’t do in my situation. It’s nothing thousands of men all over the world aren’t doing right now. But that doesn’t make it good. I’ve done a bad thing, and I wish you were here to yell at me for doing it. God, I miss fighting with you._

What really keeps Bucky up at night is the horrifying lack of logic in the dying. During that same skirmish, Bucky watched a German soldier, about to face off with Barton, trip and fall off an embankment. His head burst open like a watermelon on the sharp rocks below.

Bucky imagines God blindfolded, like Stimson when he’s pulling men’s numbers out of his fishbowl.

“That’s pretty morbid, kid,” says Dugan, stretching out of sleep where he’s lying next to Bucky in the grass.

“If God’s Stimson, then who’s blindfolding him?” Barton asks from his other side, smearing Vaseline all over his chapped nose.

“The Devil, of course,” Dugan answers.

“And who’s reading the names out?” Bucky asks.

Dugan works his jaw and thinks about it for a minute. “Peter?” he finally suggests.

“The saint or the rooster?” Barton asks.

“ _Bawk_! I don’t know him!” Dugan squawks.

A laugh bursts out of Bucky’s mouth, and once he starts, he finds he can’t stop. He laughs until his breath catches and his eyes are wet. He imagines Saint Peter squawking out names, God behind him, blindfolded and tripping over his robes.

-

A week later, they’re all sitting in the shelter of an embankment when Private Arnold calls out, “Hey Burns, you’re better at sewing than I am. You darn my socks, I’ll give you my the Stark Bar from my D ration.”

Private Burns stands up and says, “Yeah, I’ll give it a sho--” The back of his skull explodes, and he drops, first to his knees and then his face, dead.

Chaos erupts. In the ensuing firefight, they lose Private Horvath as well. They also lose their position and have to fall back.

They’re more careful after that about standing up.

Private Arnold approaches Bucky a couple nights later when he’s on watch, crouches next to him on the balls of his feet, head bowed like he’s about to do penance. He fiddles with an unlit cigarette and says, “I meant ‘Barnes.’ I meant to say ‘Barnes.’”

The confession hits Bucky like a blow to the back of his skull. “Honest mistake, pal,” he manages to get out, gripping Arnold’s shoulder. “Honest mistake.”

It stays with Bucky, the knowledge that death came for him and passed him over, thinking he was someone else. His mind turns it over and over until it gains mass, becomes a weight that drags down his thoughts and his steps.

Bucky’s already got too much gear to carry; he can’t keep adding guilt to his pack.

If he’s gonna die, he’s gonna die. But no one’s gonna die in his place.

A couple weeks later, hopped up on adrenaline, he runs right into a field of cactus like a fucking idiot and takes out a German artillery team that’s been keeping them pinned down for three days.

He gets the news from his CO a couple weeks later: he’s been promoted to corporal. 

He snaps to attention and says, “Thank you, sir,” to cover his shock; he didn’t realize the Army handed out promotions for acts of extreme stupidity. Dugan and Barton are going to wet themselves with laughter.

-

**Manhattan - October, 1943**

Steve’s in Jack’s office with his hand shoved inside the mimeograph machine. He’s the only one in the office with fingers and hands small enough to fit.

Noah walks into the office with a smirk on his face and says, “Hey, Rogers. Looks like you got your wish. Elio’s got the measles. You wanna go to Europe?”

Steve pulls his hand out of the machine so fast he damn near loses it.

-

**Southern Italy - November, 1943**

Steve was wrong; you do need muscles to hammer a nail. Without their cushioning, the impact of hammer on wood goes straight up his arm and into his back, bolts down his spine.

The stage director, Mr. Phillips, must notice, because after three days of this, he walks up to Steve where he’s hunched over a join and barks, “Rogers, you’re no use to me broken. Word has it you’re an artist. Can you paint a backdrop?”

Steve pulls down the undershirt he’s got tied around his nose and mouth, and says, “Yes, sir.”

Mr. Phillips looks over at the backstage tent, frowns, and says, “Curtain goes up in less than twenty-four hours, and Jackson’s making a mess of it. Think you can do a better job?”

Steve doesn’t want to throw anyone under the bus, but he knows that he’s one of the few trained artists on the crew. “I can try, sir,” he says.

“Not enough time for trying, Rogers. I need something good, and I need it fast.”

Steve squints up at him, not sure if that means he’s got the job or not.

“I said fast, Rogers,” Mr. Phillips shouts, and Steve is up like a shot, unknotting the undershirt from around his neck as he strides toward the backstage tent.

“And for God’s sake, don’t draw a tropical island,” Mr. Phillips calls after him. “Half the men at these shows have got brothers dying in the Pacific.”

Steve paints something appropriately dramatic but simple enough that the other volunteers can fill it in with color and shade it well in the limited amount of time they have: a waving American flag with the USO logo in the middle of the stars.

In the bottom right corner he outlines the smiling face of a USO girl, gives her Bucky’s mouth and his eyes before he realizes what he’s doing. He shakes his head at himself for being sentimental and paints over it before anyone can get a look at it.

It would just distract from the talent, anyway.

When they raise the backdrop, Mr. Phillips takes a look at it and says, nodding in mild approval, “Not bad, Rogers. Not bad at all.”

After that, Steve’s smarter about how he spends his time. Nominally, he’s on run crew, but he does whatever’s needed, puts himself in the path of any opportunity. He repairs curtains, sews buttons back on costumes, tries to keep the backstage area organized for the performers.

He even helps their medic, Bruce Banner (1A-O, conscientious objector), with his inventory and asks Mr. Phillips for more supplies on Bruce’s behalf. Bruce isn’t so good at asking for things that he needs.

On the day before their first night show, Janet van Dyne, their sound and lighting designer, volunteers Steve to crawl the lighting and audio cords under the stage so that no one trips over them or pulls them out during the show.

“I’m pretty small but even I can’t fit under there,” she tells Steve. She grins wide and holds out two cords for Steve to take, knowing that he won’t turn down the chance to do something that no one else can do. “You’re up, kid.”

Steve ties his undershirt around his nose and mouth, gives her the thumbs-up, and goes under.

He walks on his elbows through dirt and sand and sucking mud to get the audio and lighting cords where they need to go, and he comes up filthy and grinning and victorious at the end.

It’s probably the closest he’ll ever get to Basic Training.

-

Steve’s standing in the right wing -- or rather, the two-by-four covered in canvas that serves as the right wing -- untangling cords that they’ll need if the show goes past sundown. The assistant to the assistant stage manager, Peggy Carter, is standing just offstage with her arms crossed and her eyes narrowed at Gil Hodge.

Gil is standing too close to the stage, peeking out from behind the curtain so he can stare at Frances Langford’s ass. The toes of his shoes move closer and closer to the masking tape line that demarcates the audience’s view of backstage. The closer Gil gets to being seen by the audience, the closer Peggy’s shoulders get to her ears.

Steve’s thankful that he has the cords to keep his focus so he doesn’t stare at her.

Steve’s never met a woman like Peggy, and he’s never even talked to her. She runs the shows in all but name, striding around camp from sun-up to sun-down coordinating everyone’s actions, somehow keeping everything organized in her head.

She doesn’t seem to have a lot of close friends, but everyone admires her. Perhaps because she listens to people and takes suggestions easily. And when she’s confused, she does this adorable thing where she hunches her shoulders just a little and wrinkles up her entire nose-

Oh, damn. Now Steve is definitely staring.

Gil lets out a great, hiccuping laugh when Frances Langford says something funny, and Peggy takes a deep breath before stepping forward and tapping him lightly on the shoulder. “Excuse me, Gil? Will you step back behind the line, please?”

Gil looks down at the masking tape line under his feet and then back up at Peggy, and his face twists into an affronted sneer. Steve knows that look intimately; he’s thrown punches at that look. It says that Gil can do whatever he wants and is insulted that anyone would ask him to do otherwise. “I’m watching the show,” he says and turns back around.

Peggy folds her hands in front of her waist and says calmly to Gil’s back, “Gil, you do realize why that line is there, don’t you? It’s there to let you know that if you step in front of it, everyone in the audience can see you.”

“Yeah, I know that. You think I’m stupid?” Gil says without bothering to turn around and look at her.

In an instant, Peggy’s in front of him, now in full view of the audience herself. She says, her voice quiet but resonant, “Gilmore Hodge, get back behind that line. Those men out there didn’t go through hell just to see your misshapen countenance.”

Steve can’t see Gil’s face, but if the red flaring up the back of his neck is any indication, he’s furious. 

Peggy doesn’t move and doesn’t look away, just says in the same authoritative tone, “You want to hit me, go ahead. But every man in that audience will see it.”

Steve drops the cord he’s been wrapping around his forearm, ready to walk over there and redirect Hodge’s rage when Mr. Phillips walks into the wing. He ignores Steve and Peggy completely and barks out, “Hodge! Get your ass over to the mess tent and get our talent some dinner. Make yourself useful for once.”

Gil takes one step toward Peggy, just to watch her flinch, and then he turns around and storms into the tent that serves as their backstage area. Mr. Phillips follows after him, sighing and massaging his temple.

Before Steve can approach Peggy and ask her if she’s okay, she strides past him, breathing loud and pressing her hand to her chest. Steve follows her outside.

She paces, places her hand on a nearby crate as if to sit down, and then deciding against it, jumps back up. “Bugger,” she mutters. “So bloody stupid.”

Steve approaches her carefully. “Miss Carter? Ma’am? Are you okay? Can I get you anything?”

“You’ll probably be getting me a one-way ticket back to the States,” Peggy mutters and crumples onto the crate, breathing labored. “I’m going to be sacked.” She fiddles with the buttons on her blouse, probably wanting to open them so she can get some air.

“Breathe into your stomach, not your chest.”

“Pardon?” Peggy squawks.

“Just trust me, it works,” Steve says. “Let me go get you some water.” He runs off before she can protest.

When he comes back clutching two paper cups of water, Peggy’s breathing is back under control.

“It actually worked. You’re a genius,” she says, smiling wide, her cheeks rounding and dimpling on either side of her mouth. 

“Asthma,” Steve explains, handing her one cup and holding onto the other one in case she wants it too. “You feeling any better?”

Peggy takes a sip of water and shrugs. “Not really.” She squeezes the paper cup in her hand, nearly spilling its contents. “I really will be sacked if Gil tells anyone what happened.”

“They can’t fire you,” Steve asserts, “Gil started it. You’re his superior and he disobeyed you.”

“Well, I don’t know where you grew up, Rogers, but here in the real world where I’m a black woman and Gil’s father is an Army general, that hardly matters.”

Steve swallows, bows his head and thinks of Bucky. Bucky’s said the same thing to him in different ways hundreds of times. For all that Steve tries so hard to protect other people from injustice, he’s often the one who needs to be told the score. “For what it’s worth, I think you did a very brave thing.”

Peggy puts her empty cup down on the crate and reaches out to take the other one from Steve. “I don’t know that I want to be brave. I just want not to lose my job.” She ducks her head, and her eyes, deep and glittering below her heavy brows, catch Steve’s. “But thank you for saying so.”

Steve smiles, small and shy. “Do you need anything else? Maybe some food? Or I could go get one of the girls if you’d be more comfortable talking to them.”

Peggy chuckles as she takes a sip of her water. “You shouldn’t spoil me, Rogers. I’m not used to being treated like this.”

“Like what?” Steve asks.

“Like a lady,” Peggy says.

“Well,” Steve says, “you certainly are that.”

The smile drops off of Peggy’s face, replaced by a cold blankness.

Steve realizes how what he said could be interpreted and he sputters, “Oh, no. No, I didn’t-- I didn’t mean to say, you know, ‘you’re a whole lotta woman.’”

Peggy’s lip curls at the mere mention of the expression. “You didn’t,” she says, unconvinced.

Steve is sweating, shoving his hands in his pockets and fidgeting from one leg to the other. “No, I just-- I just meant to say… I just meant that you’re… you’re-- never mind. I’m sorry.” He looks up to see that Peggy’s expression hasn’t changed, almost like it’s stuck there and she’s not sure what else to do with it. He’s such a jerk for making her uncomfortable when she’s already feeling vulnerable. “I’m sorry,” he says again. “I’ll go get one of the girls for you.” He walks back into the backstage tent to find Angie.

-

They host a dance for the soldiers a couple of weeks later. Steve helps set up, then puts on his cleanest shirt and spends most of the night holding up the wall of the tent with a cup of punch in his hand. He spots Bruce standing on the opposite wall of the tent, mirroring Steve’s crossed ankles and hunched shoulders. Steve raises his glass of punch in commiseration, and Bruce spots him and does the same, smiling.

Steve leaves a couple of hours before the dance is supposed to end. On his way back to his tent, he spots Peggy and Angie, sitting next to each other on crates outside the tent where the dance is taking place. They’re sharing a flask of something between them and laughing, heads bent together and shoulders shaking. 

Steve’s just a couple steps from the darkness that would conceal him when Angie spots him. “Steee-eeve!” she calls out, singing his name. “Where are you going? Come here!”

Steve turns around slowly and can’t help but smile at the broad, inebriated grin on Angie’s face. “Hi, Angie.” He nods at Peggy who’s giving him a uncertain but not unkind smile. “Miss Carter.”

“Good evening, Steve,” Peggy says.

Angie stands up, wobbles a little, dusts off the back of her skirt. “Steve, come keep Peg company.” Steve opens his mouth to politely decline when Angie interrupts him. “C’mon, Steve. I don’t wanna leave her out here alone. And I gotta go. I mean, I _have to_  go. No! It is my duty and my _honor_ to dance with the soldiers--”

“Angie,” Peggy says, stern but smiling, “I know you’re a better actress than that. Go wash out your mouth and fix your hair. You show up to the dance drunk and they’ll put you in the mess tent.”

“And nobody wants me cooking their food,” Angie agrees. In an instant she becomes ladylike and demure. She folds her hands in front of her waist and gives Peggy and Steve a little curtsy. She walks a straight line back to the entrance to the tent, unpinning and fixing her hair as she goes.

Steve watches her go and says, “Wow. You’re really good at that.”

Peggy pulls the blanket around her shoulders closer. “Angie’s a great USO girl. She just needs help sometimes. I’m not sure what the USO expects when they send young women abroad and surround them with hundreds of eligible bachelors.”

Steve nods. “Probably why they give them so many rules to follow.”

“Indeed,” Peggy says. She shifts to the side and pulls her blanket off the second crate. “Come. Have a seat.”

Steve stays standing, shifts his weight from foot to foot. “You sure?”

“Of course.” Peggy offers him the flask she’s been holding. “We work so much. It’d be a shame not to take advantage of a night off.”

“Speak for yourself. I’m going to be cleaning all of this up in a few hours.”

Peggy just keeps holding the flask up. “Well, this will make it more enjoyable, now won’t it?”

Steve smiles small, takes the flask, and sits down next to her, leaving a good few inches of space between them. He tips back the flask and nearly spits out what has got to be paint thinner. He swallows it and wheezes, “What is that?”

Peggy chuckles and takes the flask back to take a sip. “Grappa,” she answers. “It’s not exactly brandy, but it gets the job done.”

“If the job is to burn a hole in your gut, yeah, sure,” Steve coughs. He expects to hear her laughing at him, and when he doesn’t, he turns to see her contemplating the ground.

She takes a deep breath and looks up at him, determined to say what she’s about to say. "I wanted to apologize for the other day."

“You shouldn’t be sorry,” Steve says. “I’m the one who was being inappropriate.”

“No, I overreacted. You were just trying to be nice. I shouldn’t have gotten angry--”

“Don’t apologize,” he interrupts her, and then immediately feels like a jerk for doing so. She looks up at him, confused, and he continues, “You don't ever have to apologize to me for being angry. I may not understand everything you have to deal with, but I do understand anger."

She smiles wide. “Where on earth did we find you?” she asks.

“I found you,” he answers and takes the flask when she offers it to him again. “In Manhattan. I worked out of the Times Square offices.”

“But you’re not from Manhattan, are you?” she says, “I would guess… Brooklyn?”

Steve’s never thought of himself as having a particularly strong Brooklyn accent -- being first generation -- but he’s kinda proud to hear that someone else thinks so. “That’s impressive,” he says, “How does someone from England know the difference?”

“I moved to New York seven years ago to be closer to my sister. And because there were more jobs in the theater there.”

“Which USO office did you work out of? I don’t remember seeing you at the one in Manhattan.”

“You wouldn’t have. The club in Manhattan didn’t take black girls.” She shrugs, and the expression on her face is one of pity for them, not herself. _Their loss_. “I worked at a club up in Harlem. When I heard that they were going to be putting on shows overseas, I started writing letters to the offices in Arlington. But I never heard back from them. No doubt they saw which office the letters were coming from and immediately binned them. So, I marched into the offices in Times Square and subjected the first poor soul I came across to the full list of my qualifications: father was a master carpenter, grew up in the theater, been on run crew for over ten years. Luckily, the first person I ran into was Mr. Erskine. He hired me on the spot.”

Steve smiles. “I’m almost jealous. I thought I was the only one with that schtick.”

“Mr. Erskine hired you as well?” Peggy asks.

“He did,” Steve says. “Said if I did well, he might be able to offer me the chance to go overseas. That’s all I needed.”

“Most men think of the USO as something only women sign up for,” Peggy points out.

“Well, the Army wouldn’t have me,” Steve says without thinking.

To his surprise, Peggy tilts her head back and laughs, loud and deep. “That should be our slogan,” she says.

“Army say ‘no’? Join the USO!” Steve says, kinda drunk and louder than he means to.

They sit in comfortable silence for a while, sharing the flask and the bit of warmth between their bodies as the night gets colder. ‘I’m in the Mood for Love’ comes on -- Frances Langford’s version, of course. Steve’s always liked this song.

He stands and offers Peggy his hand. “Would you like to dance?” he asks her. It’s partly the booze talking, sure. But it’s also Peggy. The heat that’s lived under Steve’s skin for as long as he can remember so often manifests itself as anger. He’s only ever met one other person that could shape it into something else. Meeting someone else -- and a woman -- who can do the same makes Steve want to be a little reckless.

Peggy lifts her hand to take Steve’s but hesitates. “They won’t like it,” she says.

“No, they won’t,” Steve agrees. “And we don't have to if you don't want to.” It’s not that Steve’s not scared; he is. “But I'd really like to dance with you.”

Peggy smiles up at him, takes his hand and lets Steve lead her inside the tent.

They muddle their way through a two-step, Steve falling slightly behind the beat and Peggy rushing slightly ahead. But when the music starts to swing, they can’t bring themselves to leave the dance floor, both of them warmed by exertion and giggling drunkenly. They launch themselves into an embarrassingly bad imitation of a lindy hop, which turns into an exaggerated Charleston. Steve’s sure that people are staring, but he couldn’t care less.

-

**About eighty miles south - Two weeks later**

“Letter for you, Sergeant!” Private Dobbs calls.

Bucky drops his mirror and razor and stands to take it, palms already breaking out in a cold, excited sweat. “Thank you, Private,” he says before he forgets. He examines the front of the envelope, and drops right back down onto his ass when he sees that not only is it from Steve, but the postmark is recent and reads: ‘Posta Militare - Foggia’. Steve’s in Foggia. Steve’s on an Italian airbase less than a hundred miles south.

Bucky tears open the envelope, and his nerves settle a bit as soon as he reads that Steve is whole and safe. He rubs his thumb over the neat block lettering, where Steve has almost embossed the page with how hard he presses down. Bucky grins like an idiot. Steve’s in Italy. Maybe their paths will cross at some point if they’re able to take Rome.

Bucky reads on:

_I met a girl, Buck. No, not a girl. A woman. An honest-to-God flesh and blood woman. You’d like her. She’s a real spitfire. And she doesn’t take any guff from me. She reminds me of you in that way. Of course this is war, so who knows what will happen, but I’m hopeful._

_Keep your fingers crossed for me. Your days of worrying about me might just be over._

_I’ll miss it though, our little apartment. I’ll miss everything about it. You know what I mean. I already miss it. I miss it every damn day. We were getting too old to be bachelors together, though, weren’t we? I think now with the war and everything that’s happening, it’s time for our real lives to start._

Bucky has to stop reading for a second, close his eyes, and breathe through the sensation of falling. Something that’s always kept him tethered to the earth is suddenly gone and he’s in freefall, his insides coming unglued and rising up toward his throat.

This is what he gets. This is the pain he deserves for letting whatever it was he was doing with Steve go on for as long as it did. Bucky’s not deluded enough to think that he and Steve ever stood a chance of keeping away from each other or keeping their hands off of each other. But it’s high time they started getting serious, thinking about the future.

And Steve damn well deserves someone who can offer him a future. He deserves every good thing a man can have. A beautiful wife, healthy kids, the whole shebang.

Good for Steve for having his head screwed on right, for taking the chance he’s been given. If Bucky gets through this war alive, he’s gotta get his act together and do the same.

“You alright, Sarge?” says Dugan from somewhere above him.

Bucky takes a deep breath and looks up. He can’t let himself get rattled around his men. He holds up the letter and grins. “Darndest thing. Friend of mine’s in Foggia.”

“No shit?” Dugan asks.

“Language, private,” Bucky scolds him with a smirk. He puts Steve’s letter in his pocket and picks up his mirror and razor again, willing his hands steady.

“You used to be fun, Sarge,” Dugan pouts.

“And you used to be good-looking,” Bucky says, “You need to trim those sideburns. Those ain’t regulation.”

Dugan huffs and walks away.

-

Bucky takes first watch that night -- he knows he’s not going to sleep much anyway, the contents of Steve’s letter running on a loop through his brain -- so he’s one of the few men awake when the ground starts to shake. 

_Tanks_ , Bucky thinks, but the rumbling is deeper and heavier than a Panzer would create, vibrating the very air inside his ears and making him queasy. The men around him sit up out of sleep and grab their rifles.

The rumbling stops, and the consequent silence almost rings through the air. Bucky looks toward where their Staff Sergeant is dug in, hoping to lock eyes with him and get a non-verbal order. He’s barely turned his head when his gaze is pulled upwards by a bright blue flash, skimming the canopy of trees above them. It’s followed by another, and then another, like stars falling. It’s almost pretty, until one lands less than a hundred yards behind them and vaporizes a tree.

Bucky yells, “Take cover!” and ducks out of his foxhole to run toward their Staff Sergeant. He needs to know what they’re dealing with; this sure as hell isn’t like any shelling he’s ever experienced before. He has to physically shove several men back down into their foxholes as he runs, some of them so shocked by what they’re seeing that they haven’t moved to protect themselves.

He knows he’s going to get hit a split second before he does; sees his own shadow flash in the darkness before his eyes and feels his hair stand up on his head as if pulled by electricity. The blast hits a foxhole just to his left, men and earth flying apart.

The impact throws Bucky to the dirt onto his right side as a crippling shock of pain shoots up his left arm. He’s squirming in the dirt, gasping with it, when he notices the forest has gone silent again. The shelling has stopped.

He’s wriggling towards cover when the sound of heavy boots approaches. He looks up to see a line of Germans walking slow and steady towards him, what look like submachine guns drawn but not firing.

One of them kicks Bucky in the face and kicks his rifle out of his hands. Bucky feels a prick in the side of his neck; he slips out of consciousness.

-

“Amputiert den Arm. Mal sehen, wie sich das Serum darauf auswirkt.”

-

**About twenty miles south - Twenty-four hours later**

Steve trudges off the plane and onto the airbase tarmac feeling like yesterday’s garbage. The cold and the pressure changes in these tin can military planes are hell on his lungs and his ears.

He goes to bed that night with his ears stopped up and the breath in his lungs wanting.

He wakes up suffocating, opens his mouth to find it covered, and opens his eyes to find himself blind. Something coarse scratches the skin of his face, and when he reaches up to push it away, he realizes it’s canvas. His tent has collapsed on top of him.

He yanks it down, searching frantically for an edge and a way out. He’s searching blind until several bright flashes of light show him that a way out is nowhere in sight. He panics, breath beginning to thin in his lungs, and pulls the canvas the opposite way.

The lights on the other side of the canvas are covered by a shadow, and then he’s yanked up off the ground by his middle, a strong bicep squeezing the breath out of him entirely.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“I am sorry, Sergeant Barnes,” Zola says gently, “You will have to be awake for this part.”_
> 
>  
> 
> Sorry.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm moving this week so I'm posting two shorter chapters instead of waiting to post one long one. The next chapter will go up at the end of this week.
> 
> Thank you to all who are reading/commenting/kudos-ing/subscribing. Smooches.
> 
> Beta-ed by [alcibiades](http://archiveofourown.org/users/alcibiades/pseuds/alcibiades). German translations by Schwa the Excitable Linguist, who asked me questions like, "Where did Gabe learn German? College? Ah, that makes a difference, then!"  
> Hover over the German for translations.

Steve awakens struggling, a voice growling in his ear, “Dammit, I’m trying to help you.”

He’s pushed back by his shoulders and opens his eyes to see a burly man with a red mustache, whose expression momentarily melts from anger to concern.

“Shit, did I hurt you?” the man says, yanking his hands away from Steve’s body.

Steve shakes his head ‘no,’ relieved beyond words that it was all just a dream.

Then he catches sight of iron bars behind the man’s head.

Steve turns, first with his head and then with his whole body, to take them in. They run from the floor to the ceiling on all sides of him and about a dozen other men, trapping them.

Steve staggers to his feet, his first instinct to run. Immediately, his legs fold up underneath him, numb from disuse, and he falls into someone’s arms.

A heavy boot stomps on the metal grate above their heads, and dirt falls into Steve’s open eyes and mouth. From above, someone shouts, “Ruhe da unten!”

The man cradling Steve says to the guards, “Entschuldigung. Wir werden ruhig sein,” and then in Steve’s ear, “It’s okay. They’re not going to hurt us. They’re just here to guard us.”

Steve looks up at the guards standing above them, their faces gaunt and expressionless; they couldn’t look less interested in the dozen men imprisoned beneath them. Steve would almost rather they looked angry -- looked anything. “You sure about that?” he asks the man behind him as he sits up and out of his arms.

He turns around to see a young black man wearing a green jumpsuit. An American soldier.

The young man shrugs, resigned. “Figure it’s better not to panic until they give us a reason to.” His uniform is military, but the stubble on his chin is definitely not regulation, looks like it’s about two or three days old.

Steve glances around to see that the other men in the cell with him are in a similar state of dishevelment. “How long was I out for?” Steve asks.

“Including the train ride here, about two days,” says the man with the red whiskers. “You’ve been in and out. You were unconscious when they threw you in the car, sounded like you weren’t breathing too good. It got worse the higher up we got in the mountains.”

“Luckily, Dugan here took a shine to you,” the young black man says, smirking.

Dugan ducks his head and grumbles, “Wasn’t just me.”

“I saved your life too,” pipes up a blond to Steve’s left, nearly shouting. “You’ve got some sharp elbows, kid. You’re ever in a fight, throw those first.”

Dugan winces. “Christ, Barton, keep it down.”

The blond man looks sheepish. “Shit, sorry.” He looks at Steve, points to his ear and explains, “Shelling hit right next to me. Can’t hear a dang thing.” He shrugs. “The name’s Clint Barton.” He points at the black man, and the redhead. “That’s Gabe Jones. That’s Timothy Aloysius Cadwallader Dugan. Also known as Dum Dum.”

“Thanks, _Francis_ ,” Dugan grumbles.

Clint ignores him and continues to introduce everyone else in the group. They’re mostly American soldiers, with a couple of exceptions. They look a bit wild around the eyes, but they nod and smile at Steve, obviously trying to hold themselves together.

Steve introduces himself as, “Steve Rogers. USO.” He glances up at the guards to make sure they’re not paying attention and then asks Jones, keeping his voice low, “Where are we?”

“Best guess: somewhere in the central Apennines, just north of the Winter Line,” Jones reports.

“It’s not just a POW camp,” says Dugan. “We keep hearing these sounds… I think it might be a factory. Munitions by the smell of it.”

And now that he mentions it, Steve picks up on the sharp and oddly pleasing smell of cordite in the air.

“They’ve been feeding us,” Barton says, huddling closer to them. “Giving us water and a bucket to piss in. All in all, it could be worse.”

It could get worse, and Steve’s not gonna wait around for that to happen. He takes a closer look at the cage they’re in. “I might be able to squeeze through those bars,” he observes.

“Oh, yeah? And then what?” Dugan asks, chuckling.

Steve assures him, “I’ll figure something out.”

-

**The same facility, two floors up**

Bucky wakes up covered in sweat, the left side of his face and his bare chest sticking to a leather cushioned table.Somewhere behind and above him, two men are chatting in German and laughing.

He shifts to get up and is yanked back down by straps binding his body, from his ankles to his right wrist. He tries to pull his left arm up, not feeling a strap on his left wrist, but finds that he can’t, not because it’s held down but because it’s not moving like it’s supposed to, as if it’s bending the wrong way. The table that he’s laying on is close enough to the ground that he should be able to reach down and touch concrete with the tips of his fingers. But he dangles his left arm down and feels only air.

A door opens somewhere behind him, and a high-pitched voice squeals, “Wieso habt ihr Vollidioten seine linke Schulter nicht fixiert? Seine Nähte hätten aufreißen können!”

The two men standing above Bucky move farther away from him, bumping into something that makes a metallic clash. “Es tut uns leid, Herr Zola,” they both say.

The high-pitched voice snaps, “Gib das her. Und holt mir noch zwei Riemen für seine Schulter und seinen Hals.”

Bucky’s heart jackrabbits against his ribs and he inhales in desperate gulps, the strap around his chest constricting even those. He turns his head to see who’s behind him and is blinded by a bright, sterile light.

A small, soft hand buries its fingers in his hair and holds his head down as a strap is tied around his neck. Bucky thrashes against the restraints, his panicked breaths pulling one great, impending wail up into his chest.

“Zieh drei Milliliter von dem Serum auf,” the high-pitched voice -- Zola -- says, shuffling around behind Bucky where he can’t see, the clatter of implements being picked up and put down.

Something cold touches Bucky’s lower back. He gasps and screams, “Get the fuck away from me!”

Zola shushes him, his thumb massaging circles into Bucky’s scalp. “No need to worry, Sergeant Barnes. It is only the topical anesthetic. Now breathe in. This will sting just a little.”

Bucky pulls in a hitching breath and lets it out as a wet sob as a thick needle is pushed into his skin, and then even further, into his spine. “Please. Don’t.”

“I am sorry, Sergeant Barnes,” Zola says gently, “You will have to be awake for this part.”

_

“I tried to make it once, but it got sorta…” Steve pauses to let some saliva collect in his mouth, running his tongue along his teeth where the inside of his mouth has started sticking to them. He’s not getting enough water; none of them are. Steve doesn’t know how much a man needs before he starts to dehydrate, but it’s definitely more than the ladle-ful they get every day. The headache he’s had since he woke up here has swelled to pounding; he can feel his heartbeat at the base of his skull and behind his eyeballs.

“I tried to make it once,” he says, too loud, repeating himself to distract himself from his thoughts. “I tried to make it once but it-- but it… stuck. It stuck to the pan and got kinda… burnt on the outside and didn’t really cook on the inside. I think I needed to use more butter--”

“Rogers,” someone says, softly like they’re trying not to startle him, “Go to sleep.”

“Weiss wanted to know the difference between latkes and boxty,” Steve protests. “I’m indulging him. Someone’s gotta keep you meatballs entertained.”

“Steve,” the man says gently, “That was hours ago. It’s the middle of the night.”

“It is?” Steve looks up through the grate above their heads, and sure enough there’s no daylight coming in from whatever is up there that opens to the outside world. Just the alien blue glow from the guard’s weapons, moving with them as they stroll.

“Huh,” Steve observes.

He’s jumping in and out of time. It started happening a few days ago. He’ll close his eyes to blink and open them to find that hours have passed.

The last he was aware, it was morning and they were getting their daily ration of black bread. He doesn’t remember eating it.

He doesn’t have time to lose; he needs to be planning their escape.

“Save it for the morning program, Rogers,” the man says, “You need to get some sleep.”

Steve looks up to see it’s Gabe talking to him. He’s patting the pile of jackets a couple of the fellas have given up -- despite Steve’s protests -- to make a bed for Steve, to keep him up off the cold, concrete ground a bit.

“Alright,” Steve acquiesces. “But first thing tomorrow--”

“We plan our escape,” Gabe says, “I promise.” He shifts closer to Steve, bracketing him on one side and throwing half of his jacket over him.

Behind Steve, Dugan shifts closer in his sleep. Barton and Sousa get in on the huddle too. They form a wall of warmth around Steve, nesting him like a baby bird.

“You gotta help me plan, Gabe,” Steve mumbles, his eyes already closed and his thoughts beginning to drop off. “We can’t let these guys down.”

“We won’t,” Steve hears Gabe promise before he slips into unconsciousness.

-

When Steve wakes up the next morning, Gabe is gone. His fur-lined jacket is the only indication he was ever there.

-

They sleep in shifts after that. Barton and Weiss are awake when they come for Dugan. They both get a muzzle to their temples for their resistance. As soon as that happens, Dugan stops struggling and goes willingly.

Castillo is less dignified when he goes. Norton goes after the guards on Castillo’s behalf and gets his skull caved in on the iron bars by a guard who’s got to be over six feet tall.

They leave Castillo’s body where it lands for two days. A warning.

-

Five days after they take Castillo, just a couple hours after they’ve had their breakfast, a short, balding man in a lab coat comes strolling through the room where their cages are lined up, flanked by three guards.He stops at each cage he passes and studies each man in it before shaking his head and muttering, “Nein.”

Finally, he gets to Steve’s cage. His eyes land on Steve immediately, lighting up like he’s seeing something miraculous. He smiles with his lips pressed together like he’s trying to hide his excitement.

“Den kleinen Milchbubi hier,” he coos. He steps up to the bars and points his finger right through them, right at Steve. “Den will ich.”

Immediately, Barton, Sousa, and several other men are on their feet, forming a wall around Steve.

Steve can’t have that. He pushes himself up onto his knees and rasps, “It’s okay, fellas.” He puts a hand on Barton’s back to steady himself as he stands.

Barton sees him and grabs Steve’s elbows to help him up even as he protests, “Steve--”

“It’s okay,” Steve repeats, pulling his arms out of Barton’s grip and squeezing out of the circle before anyone can decide to be a hero.

He stands up as straight as his crooked back will allow and looks into a pair of gimlet eyes that make his guts clench and his skin crawl.

“I’ll go,” he says.

-

Bucky’s ma keeps calling him ‘Sergeant Barnes’. It’s strange, but Bucky’s so damn glad to see her that he doesn’t question it. She spits into her hand and uses it plaster down his cowlick, like she used to do when he was a kid.

“Sergeant Barnes,” his ma says again, sounding far away and confused, and it frightens him to hear it. He rushes forward to wrap his arms around her waist and bury his head in her stomach. And then something kicks him in the back and he comes awake seizing, his spine bowing and his lungs voiding air.

He grits his teeth and forces his body to inhale, and then exhale, again and again. After a minute the muscles around his spine loosen enough that his back is touching the table. It still tingles all along his vertebrae, from the small of his back to the soft indent at the base of his skull. All forty-eight injection sites.

They’ve removed some of his restraints and tightened the remainder. At some point, they switched out his head rest with one that holds him in place at his temples and keeps him from moving his head from side to side.

Around him, the room is cold and empty of any sounds that suggest he has human company. Nothing but the whirring inhale and exhale of a machine somewhere to his left.

Bucky almost wishes Zola were here, just so he doesn’t have to anticipate what will happen when he comes back.

“Sergeant Barnes?” someone says. Not his ma. It’s a woman with a British accent. “Can you hear me?” she asks.

“Who...” Bucky starts, the hairs on the back of his neck standing up. Her voice is too loud in his ears for the hush she’s speaking in. And it has a strange echoing quality to it that makes him think he may be hallucinating.

“Dear God, you can hear me,” she says, “My name is Peggy. Peggy Carter.”

Bucky instinctively tries to jerk his head to the side to look for her only to be reminded that he can’t. “Where are you?” he asks.

“In the room next to yours, I think,” Peggy says.

“I don’t understand,” he says.

“I heard Zola and the doctors speaking to yesterday when they were--” Peggy stops and then says gently, “Are you alright?”

They’re tricking him, Zola and whoever else is behind him. They’re trying to trick him into saying something. What, he’s not sure. He takes a deep breath and starts, “Barnes, James Buchanan. Sergeant. Three, two, five, five, seven, zero, three, eight. Barnes, James Bu--”

“Would you keep it down, Sarge? Some of us have had a long day,” says a voice that Bucky never thought he’d be so happy to hear.

“Dugan?” he chokes.

“Reporting for duty,” Dugan answers. Bucky can almost hear him tipping his bowler.

Bucky smiles for the first time in what feels like years. “Dugan, what the hell do they want you for? You’re not smart enough to give away any intel.”

“Har har,” Dugan says. And then, after a pause, “Where are you? Your voice sounds… strange.”

“I think you’re in the room next to his, judging by the volume of your voice,” Peggy interjects, “Tell me, Private Dugan, can you hear me?”

“Sure can,” Dugan answers. “Where are you?” And then, to Bucky, “Sarge, did you go and get yourself a girl while I wasn’t looking?”

“We’re in the room on the other side of Sergeant Barnes’.” Peggy says, wisely ignoring him. “I believe there’s a man on the other side of our room too, but I can’t get him to respond to me.”

“‘We?’” Bucky asks.

“There’s a girl in here with me,” Peggy answers. “She’s Russian, I think. But I could be wrong. It’s tough to get a read on her.”

“So, if you’re two rooms away from me, how can I hear you?” Dugan asks.

“I think they’re giving us a hormone of some sort,” Peggy answers. “I can hear everything that’s happening in the rooms on either side of me. And I think-- I’ve noticed my straps have been getting tighter over the past few days, but I don’t think they’re tightening them. I think I’m growing into them.”

Both Bucky and Dugan are silent.

When neither of them say anything, Peggy goes on, “I think I can break them - the straps.”

She keeps saying ‘I think’ like he and Dugan are just supposed to take her at her word. “You sure about that?” Bucky asks, hoping to get something more substantial out of her.

“No, I’m not sure,” Peggy says, impatience edging into her voice, “I haven’t done it yet. If Zola or one of the other doctors came in and saw what I’d done they’d just make it harder for me to break out again.”

“So, say you can free yourself, then what?” Dugan asks. “If this is an escape plan then we’re missing a few steps.”

“Which is what I was hoping the two of you would help me with,” Peggy says, anger raising the volume of her voice. “Maybe the two of you don’t care what happens to you, but I am not going to die here.”

It sounds like something Steve would say. Hell, if Steve were here he’d call Bucky all sorts of names for not jumping at the chance to escape.

Steve’s voice, deep and displeased, echoes in Bucky’s ears, a clear and painful memory. And Bucky will never hear it again if he doesn’t get out of here.

Bucky tests his bonds, trying first to pull himself up and then trying to yank his arms out of them. After just a minute, he’s so exhausted that he flops back down into the table, limp and out of breath. “I can’t-- I can’t get out,” he pants.

“Neither can I,” says Dugan, sounding similarly winded.

Pathetic. The two trained soldiers in this situation and they’re both useless.

“I can get out,” says a different voice. It sounds like a young girl. Bucky feels sick to hear it in a place like this.

“Natasha,” Peggy warns.

“I can get out,” Natasha insists.

Bucky hears the squeak of skin moving against leather, and then Peggy says, “Where did you get that?”

Natasha giggles, a sound that sends a shiver down Bucky’s spine.

“I can get out too,” says another voice, a man’s.

“Jones?” Dugan asks, incredulous.

“Dugan?” Jones responds. “Oh, no. Am I dead? Is this hell?”

Bucky laughs so loud and sudden that his back twinges.

“Coupla comedians we got over here,” Dugan grouses.

“Corporal Jones,”  Peggy cuts in. “Good of you to join us. Did you say you can break your straps?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Jones says slowly. He sounds like he might be drugged. “Might be able to take down a coupla guards too. Whatever they’ve been giving me… I think it’s working.”

“You don’t sound too sharp right now, pal,” Dugan observes.

“Yeah, they’ve been trying a bunch of different things on me,” Jones says. “Nothing seems to stay in my system too long. As long as we do it in the morning or early afternoon, I’ll be fine.”

“And what are we doing? I need details, fellas. And ladies,” Bucky says. “Peggy, you sound like you’ve been paying attention. How many guards are we looking at here?”

It’s Natasha who answers. “Seven or eight. And two or three patrolling the stairwells at either end of the hall. It will be easier to dispatch them if they are all in one place. Perhaps, Sergeant Barnes and Private Dugan, one of you could draw them to your room.”

It takes Bucky a second to realize what she’s implying. “So we’re the bait.”

“You can call yourselves whatever you like,” Natasha says, unconcerned with Bucky’s pride.

After a moment of silence, Dugan volunteers, “Well, you ladies don’t know this, but before the war, I was in the circus--”

Both Bucky and Jones groan at the same time.

Dugan continues, “And I am a grade-A performer, if I do say so myself.”

“You _do_ say so yourself,” Bucky mumbles.

“I’ll be the bait,” Dugan says, sounding far too cheery.

“I think I saw this in a movie once,” Jones slurs.

“Was it the Keystone Cops?” Bucky asks.

“If we’re the Keystone Cops, can I be the police chief?” Dugan asks.

“Not on your life, Dugan,” Bucky says. “I’m the police chief. Now here’s what I’m thinking…”

-

Dugan wasn’t kidding: he is a damn good performer.

When the agreed-upon time comes to set their plan into motion, Dugan lets out a scream so primal and terrified that Bucky’s sure he’s not faking it. It sets off a corresponding terror in Bucky that has him yanking at his straps as at least half a dozen pairs of boots come jogging down the hallway outside his room.

From Peggy and Natasha’s room, Bucky hears whispering and grunting and then the sound of leather being stretched and snapped. Something runs into the door to their room repeatedly, but -- from the sound of frantic whispering -- it won’t open.

Bucky hears another door burst open somewhere, the soft swish of someone creeping down the hall toward Peggy and Natasha’s room on bare feet, and then something rams into their door with enough force to make the table Bucky’s strapped to shake.

It must be Jones.

The plan is for Peggy, Natasha, and Jones to break into Bucky’s room next, but Bucky hears the sounds of several pairs of boots marching out of Dugan’s room and into the hallway . He thinks, That’s it. They’re done for and, therefore, so are he and Dugan.

Bucky hears shouting, the wet thud of blows being exchanged, and then bones cracking and a man wailing in pain. Several bodies hit the floor, and then it’s silent.

Something rams against Bucky’s door. Bucky braces himself for the worst, but is relieved when a man and a woman come bursting into his room. This must be Jones and Peggy.

Peggy is cradling her right hand like it’s injured. She fans out her fingers and then clenches them together again. She frowns, confused, and lifts her hand up in front of her face to stare at it.

Jones looks about as bad as he sounded the other day, skin ashen and eyes bloodshot. He rushes to Bucky’s side, but stops short of pulling off his straps, staring at something on Bucky’s left side that he can’t see.

“What? What’s wrong?” Bucky asks.

Jones shakes himself out of his thoughts. “Nothing,” he says and gets to work on Bucky’s straps.

Bucky hears voices next door in Dugan’s room and identifies them as Natasha’s and Dugan’s. A minute later Dugan comes limping into Bucky’s room, looking in even worse shape than Jones does. Behind him, in Bucky’s doorway, keeping an eye out for more guards that should be showing up at any moment, is Natasha.

She can’t be any older than thirteen, four-foot-nothing with pale skin and a nest of tangled red hair. There’s blood on her hands and sprayed across her face, and she’s holding one of the guard’s blue-glowing rifles like a person comfortable with a rifle’s size and weight.

Jones removes the last of Bucky’s straps, and Bucky sits up. When he throws his legs to the right side of the table and puts his left hand down to hop off of it, he lists to the left and almost falls.

“Whoa,” says Jones, catching Bucky around his middle.

Bucky shakes his left arm, thinking that maybe it’s fallen asleep, and looks down to make sure there’s nothing wrong with it.

Where his left arm should be, there’s nothing but a wiggling stump covered in bandages and tape.

It’s impossible. He can still feel it. He can bend his elbow, flex his fingers.

He brings his hand up to his face. Still not there. He brings his hands together in front of him, and he can’t feel his left hand with his right, nor his right hand with his left.

His arm is gone. They’ve taken his arm.

His heart jumps up into his throat, choking him and beating hard enough that he can hear it in his ears.

“Hey, Barnes. Bucky,” someone says.

Bucky looks up to see Dugan standing in front of him, trying to catch his eyes. He’s got one hand on Bucky’s right shoulder and the other on the left side of Bucky’s neck, away from the-- the stump.

Bucky looks around to see that they’re standing in the hallway now. He doesn’t remember leaving his room.Behind Dugan, Peggy, Jones, and Natasha are standing, staring at him with a mixture of pity and revulsion.

“What are you looking at?” he barks at them.

“Hey, hey,” Dugan shushes him, like he’s a damned animal. “C’mon, Sarge, we need you right now.”

Natasha steps forward then and presses a Walther that she got off one of the guard’s bodies into Bucky’s right hand.

“What am I supposed to do with this?” Bucky asks. He can’t fire a pistol properly with one arm.

“Something is better than nothing,” she answers.

It takes Bucky a moment to realize she’s talking about the gun, not his arm.

He looks behind her to Jones, standing with his rifle at the ready, awaiting orders.

Next to him stands Peggy who’s staring terrified at the distant sound of boots marching up a stairwell somewhere to their right. At some point during his and Peggy’s planning of their escape, he forgot: she’s not a soldier. If Bucky were to put the Walther into her hand, she’d be in even worse shape than he is.

They’ve all come this far through some unbelievable combination of guts and determination not to die. The least Bucky can do is his best by them. And if Bucky’s skills as a leader and his body are good for nothing else, he can act as their shield.

He ejects the magazine from the Walther; all eight rounds are there. That’s good, but it’s not good enough, not with the number of guards he can hear marching up the stairwell. He re-loads the magazine, clicks the safety on and crouches down to pull a holster and another pistol off of one of the dead guards.

“Everyone, grab what you think you’ll be able to shoot. Natasha, help her,” he says, motioning to Peggy.

Once everyone is armed, he points toward the end of the hall that -- from the sound of it -- opens onto a large room filled machinery of some sort, away from the approaching guards. “Jones and Peggy, start breaking open doors. We’ll get as many people out between here and the exit as we can. I’ll take point with Dugan behind me. Natasha, you’re bringing up the rear. Go. Now.”

-

“Cease from anger, and forsake wrath,” Steve says, his soft voice echoing off the hard concrete walls all around him. For once in his life he’s not angry at all. He’s too tired to be angry, can’t imagine ever having the strength to fight again.

“Fret not thyself in any wise to do evil. For evildoers shall be cut off: but those that wait upon the Lord, they shall inherit the earth. The meek shall inherit the earth; and shall delight themselves in the abundance of pe-” Steve chokes on the rest of the word, his throat closing up when his body is gripped by a violent contraction. They’ve been rolling through him in unpredictable waves since the most recent spinal injection, seizing him off and on for a couple of hours before leaving him to fall into a fevered sleep.

His body won’t survive this, he knows. The seizures will stop his heart, eventually. Maybe tomorrow, maybe today, maybe two minutes from now.

Zola comes to him sometimes to press a cool cloth to his forehead and whisper what sound like sweet words in a language he doesn’t understand. And Steve shudders before turning into his touch, drawn toward the human-shaped monster, his only company in this place besides death.

Steve pulls a trembling breath into his lungs and forces his thoughts away from grief and back to Psalm 37, a piece of scripture that’s always provided him comfort. It’s calmed him more than once when he’s been in the grips of his temper or a fever.

His ma didn’t approve of memorizing and parroting scripture, said that was for Evangelicals, but she took her own comfort in repetition when Steve was close to death, whether it was praying the Rosary or singing “Seoithín, Seo Hó”.

Bucky would leave the praying and the singing to Steve’s ma and try to keep Steve tethered to the world by forcing him to play Costello to his Abbott.

“Look, you got a first baseman?” he’d ask Steve as he rubbed salve into his chest.

“Certainly,” Steve would whisper around a swollen throat.

“Who's playing first?”

“That's right.”

“When you pay off the first baseman every month, who gets the money?”

“Every dollar of it.”

And when Steve was too sick to talk, Bucky would play both parts for Steve’s amusement.

“All I'm trying to find out is the fellow's name on first base,” Steve starts up.

Just then, something slams into the door to Steve’s room, causing him to jump against the straps holding him down to the table.

A figure appears above him, a young girl with red hair. She pulls the straps off of Steve’s body like they’re made of paper.

“Run,” she tells him, and then she’s gone.

Steve doesn’t move for a moment, certain he’s imagined it, but when he lifts his arms up, no straps hold him down. He rolls onto his side, gritting his teeth and coughing out his breaths as pain shoots through his back. He manages to push himself upright, and tries to slide off the table and onto his feet only to have his legs give out underneath him. He collapses to the floor in a heap of pain.

The floor rumbles underneath him, and he looks up to see a stampede of men and women, dirty and partially undressed as he is, running by the open door.

People are escaping.

Steve pulls himself across the floor, moving his body forward inch by inch with his hands and elbows, shifting his weight from hip to hip.

By the time he gets his upper body through the door’s threshold, the hallway’s almost emptied out. He reaches a hand up, hoping that someone will see him and help him up, but no one pays him any attention, too panicked to save anyone but themselves.

Steve pulls himself fully out of the room behind the last person in the hallway, the girl with the red hair. She sees him, turns around, and takes a step to run back toward him before freezing in place.

Steve hears the sound of boots entering the hallway behind him.

He looks up at the girl -- she’s so young, can’t be any older than twelve or thirteen -- and rasps, “Go. Get out of here.”

She hesitates for a moment, her features tightening with regret, before turning and running away.

Behind Steve, the guards’ weapons squeal and suck all the air out of the hallway as they charge up. Steve takes a deep breath and braces himself for impact.

He’s struck instead by Zola’s voice, shrieking, “Halt! Nicht schießen!”

Steve turns his head to see Zola approaching him with his arms outstretched, his eyes soft with joy. “Mein süßer Bub,” he coos.

Steve hears locks tumbling open on the floor below him, doors opening, the sounds of men freeing themselves.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come live in mortal terror of Cap 3 with me on [tumblr](http://sneaqui.tumblr.com/).


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We end Act 1 with a chapter that, much like Steve, is short, sad, and to-the-point.

There are other prisoners like them, people who’ve been changed by whatever Zola injected them with.

Bucky watches a man, frightened and stumbling and wearing nothing but a shredded pair of slacks, shake off a blast from a vaporizing gun and throw the offending guard fifty yards into the compound wall.

Another man (who Bucky later finds out is from Jones’ unit) saves Natasha and Jones from vaporization when he caves two attacking guards’ heads in. His fist shatters their helmets like so much clay.

Every action that Bucky takes stutters to a halt when he finds his body unable to complete it. He reaches out with his left hand to pull a man with a broken leg up off the ground and almost gets them both vaporized in the extra five seconds it takes him to shove his gun into its holster, spin, and grab him with his right hand.

He can fire his pistol all right, but his aim is shit with one arm. And he can punch and bodily tackle the guards -- easily now that his body is pumped full of whatever they’ve injected him with -- but his balance is all fucked up. The lack of a counter weight on the left side of his body has him careening to the right and stumbling over and over again.

He can’t climb up into the tank that Natasha and Jones are able to steal, so he joins up with a guy who’s commandeered a covered truck and is loading it with escaped prisoners. Bucky puts his hand on the guy’s shoulder to get his attention and ask how he can help. The guy startles and whirls around, his fist at the ready, and Bucky laughs in his face.

It’s Private Clinton Goddamn Barton. He’s filthy, smells like shit, and his clothes are hanging off of him, but he’s one of the most beautiful sights Bucky’s ever seen.

“Sarge!” Barton hollers and gives Bucky a brief but fierce hug. He catches sight of Becky’s left side, and his face falls.

Bucky speaks before Barton can offer him sympathy that he neither wants nor has the time to deal with. "Never thought I'd be so happy to see you, Barton," he says. “Now c'mon. Let’s finish getting this truck loaded up and get the fuck out of here.”

The drive down the mountain is twelve hours of white-knuckled terror, their convoy of five Jeeps and two tanks creeping down the road that clings to the side of the mountain at five miles-an-hour. At any moment, they expect the Germans to catch up to them and ram them off the road and into the abyss. Or slam into them head-on, driving up the mountain around one of the sharp curves that keep them from seeing the road ahead.

Bucky’s never been so glad to have Barton with him. He keeps Bucky distracted, flapping his gums the whole down way about his folks’ farm back in Iowa, his pickup truck (Carole), his one-eyed dog (Lucky), the girls in town he’s made time with (all of them). And he keeps his eyes sharp on the road ahead of them at all times.

At last, they make it off the mountain and to a camp outside of Naples. Bucky walks into the camp half a mile ahead of the convoy, waving a filthy white shirt given to him by one of the other prisoners as a white flag, hoping they won’t be shot at for driving German vehicles.

They’re greeted by dumbfounded expressions from every rank. Only the medics and the nurses know what to do, moving quickly and decisively to get the people in the worst shape seen to immediately.

The first thing the COs do -- even before giving them food or water or blankets to cover their nakedness -- is separate out the soldiers from the civilians and the women from the men.

Bucky protests, wanting to keep an eye on Peggy and Natasha, but the COs aren’t having it.

“It’s all right, Sergeant. I’ll look after her,” Peggy says with a placating smile, as if Bucky’s the delicate one in this situation. She takes Natasha -- become suddenly shy and childlike -- by the hand as they’re herded to a different part of the camp.

The next two days are a constant rotation of medical exams, debriefings with COs who all seem to disagree on how to handle what Bucky and the other prisoners have been through, and enforced rest that does Bucky no good.

He can’t sleep. Every time he closes his eyes he’s alone in a cold, echoing room.

So he stays up, practices shouldering and aiming his rifle one-handed.

-

On their fifth day back, Peggy finds Bucky in the tent he’s sharing with Barton and Jones. They’re playing rummy while Bucky assembles and disassembles his rifle.

They all make noises of surprise and elation when they see Peggy. Bucky steps forward to squeeze her shoulder and ask how she and Natasha are doing, but stops when he sees the state she’s in.

Her eyes are red-rimmed and the skin around them is tender and swollen. She holds a sealed envelope out to Bucky; it trembles in her clenched fist.

“Mr. Phillips found me after he wrote this. He thought I might like to know. I saw that it was addressed to you…” She trails off, her lips parted but no words coming out, just a barely-audible whine as her chest constricts.

Bucky has no idea who Mr. Phillips is or why he might have a letter addressed to Bucky. He steps forward and closes his right hand around Peggy’s left, gently pulls the letter out of her grip.

The envelope is indeed addressed to him. And the return address area is stamped with the USO logo.

Bucky takes the envelope between his teeth and shoves his finger under the flap to get at the letter inside. He reads,

_Dear Sergeant Barnes;_

_It is with a heavy heart that I must inform you of the death of your friend, Steven Grant Rogers, who was serving his country as a USO volunteer._

Bucky's ears ring and his vision blurs at the edges. Somewhere outside of the collapse that's happening inside his body, Peggy says, “Sergeant Barnes-- James, I’m so sorry,” from the thickness of her voice, it sounds like she’s crying again, and he can’t for the life of him figure out why she has the right to. “I didn’t realize you knew him. I would have told you--”

“Peggy,” Bucky says to himself, remembering the last letter that Steve wrote to him about the “spitfire” he was working with. He looks up at Peggy. “You knew him,” he says. And then he’s shouting, “He was supposed to be safe! He was in the goddamn USO! What the hell happened?”

Barton and Jones are on either side of him immediately, both with a hand on his chest, holding him back from Peggy.

She’s sobbing now, but doesn’t step back or look away from him. “Our camp was attacked. Most of us were taken. I didn’t see Steve but--”

“He was with us, in one of the cages,” Jones says.

Bucky’s head snaps in his direction. “You were with him?” he asks.

“We both were,” Barton says, and Bucky stumbles back, away from all of them. Away from the chorus of voices telling him Steve’s dead.

“I was there when he was taken by Zola,” Barton continues, staring a thousand yards into the distance. “We tried to protect him, me and the other guys in the cage. But he insisted-- He didn’t want anyone else to get hurt.”

Of course Steve didn’t. Bucky nearly laughs, but when he opens his mouth what comes out is a wretched moan that sounds more animal that human. He stumbles out of the tent, needing air. He clutches the canvas in his right hand, falls to his knees, and vomits, retching until there’s nothing left in him.

-

A couple of days later, the spooks show up. They introduce themselves as “from the SSR” but pointedly offer no explanation as to what the SSR is.

They’re all twice Bucky’s age and wear an impressive array ribbons and medals on their uniforms. Their nail beds are clean and their hands are soft when Bucky shakes them, but the steel in their eyes and their efficiency in everything makes it impossible to mistake them for anything but life-long military.

All of the “enhanced” individuals are given thorough examinations by doctors that the SSR have brought with them. They take vial after vial of blood from Bucky’s veins. They test his hearing and his eyesight and shove things into various orifices. They take detailed notes on the way his stump has healed and speak in hushed whispers to each other.

Bucky remains cooperative and pliant throughout the whole thing, feeling nothing. Surprised that they can take anything out of his body that hasn’t already leaked out through his eyes.

After three days of examinations and interviews, each of the “enhanced” prisoners is called in separately to speak to the five men in charge.

Bucky stands at attention in front of them, eyes puffy and nose red and using every ounce of energy not to sway on his feet with exhaustion and grief. He wonders if he’ll be sent home due to his handicap. The idea of going back to Brooklyn without Steve, without so much as a body to bury, makes his chest ache.

The man in the middle of the table has a file sitting unopened in front of him, as if he doesn’t need to look at it to know who Bucky is. He offers Bucky a nod and a reserved smile, respect from a superior officer to a subordinate.

“Sergeant Barnes, I’m Colonel Anders,” he says. He gestures to his right. “These are Lieutenant Colonels Scott and Segal.” He gestures to his left. “These are Lieutenant Colonels McGonagle and Fury.”

“Sirs,” Bucky says.

“We’re impressed with what we’ve been hearing, Sergeant,” Colonel Anders says. “You’ve been named by several people as the leader of an operation that saved over 200 souls.”

“Credit for the idea should go to Ms. Carter,” Bucky insists. “And Ms. Romanoff, Private Barton, and Corporal Jones held me together when I realized-- when I realized my arm was gone. None of us would have made it out of there if it hadn’t been for them.”

“You’re being modest, Sergeant,” says Lieutenant Colonel Fury. “You planned and executed an escape under conditions that would break most men. Not only that, but you did an impressive amount of damage on your way out for a man who’d just had his arm forcibly amputated.”

It’s the first time anyone -- including Bucky himself -- has referred to it as something that was done to him against his will, instead of a strange sort of condition he’s suffering from. He notices the patch over Lieutenant Colonel Fury’s left eye and wonders if he knows something about that.

“Thank you, Sir,” he says, meaning it.

“What we’d like to know now, Sergeant,” Colonel Anders says, “and I want you to be completely honest with us: Do you want to go home?”

Bucky thinks of his ma, a pillar cracking under the weight of worry. She’d fall to her knees with relief at being able to see her boy again, damaged as he is. His heart squeezes in empathy for her, for his pa, and for the girls.

Then he thinks of the empty bed waiting for him back in Brooklyn. The sheets on it probably still smell like Steve, like charcoal dust and Ivory soap.

He forces himself to stand up straight above the clenching in his gut and says, “I’d like to see my family, just so they know I’m okay. But other than that, I don’t have much to go back to.”

Colonel Anders and Lieutenant Colonel Fury have the decency to look sympathetic. The other Lieutenant Colonels can’t help the way their eyes light up, as if they’re pleased with this answer.

Colonel Anders nods and says, “Then you’ll be getting your orders soon. Welcome to the SSR, Sergeant.”

-

He has to wait until spring, when the ground thaws, to bury Steve. There’s no body, but Bucky still wants him to have a casket. He gets a simple but handsome pine one, with molding, a carved cross at the head, and a polished finish. Steve would grouse about it being a waste of money, which is why Bucky does it. He always did like buying Steve things that Steve didn’t think he needed.

Inside the casket, Bucky places Steve’s pencils and his drawing board. He’s keeping Steve’s drawings. They deserve to be looked at, and often.

They bury Steve in the reserved plot next to his ma and pa. Bucky gets him a concrete headstone. He’s tempted to spend the money on a marble one, but it’s somehow more appropriate that Steve’s should match his folks’.

On the headstone, they engrave the words:

_Steven Grant Rogers_

_1918 - 1943_

_Beloved Son and Friend._

The entirety of I Corinthians 15:53 won’t fit, but Bucky asks them to engrave the last part, the important part: “Death is swallowed up in victory.” It damn well better be. The only thing that lets Bucky sleep at night is knowing that, wherever Steve is now, he’s no longer in pain.

Bucky stays behind after the service is over, telling his family that he’ll be home later.

He crouches down on the balls of his feet in front of the headstone, runs his thumb gently over Steve’s name, and says, “Give Him hell for me, Stevie.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tune in next week when Bucky Forrest Gumps his way through the late twentieth century! (He really doesn't. He doesn't meet any famous historical figures or witness any important events or really do anything but yell at kids to get off his lawn... OR DOES HE??)
> 
> Come fart around with me on tumblr. Same username.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“I thought I was fighting to prevent the obliteration of the human race. But you wanna fight so that these kids can smoke dope and eat hamburgers, you go right ahead.”_
> 
> In which Bucky is a paranoid and cranky old man.
> 
> Heads up: Warning for racism in this chapter. No racial slurs are used, but insults are used that some may find upsetting. Please let me know if you want more details or think I should add any tags.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry updates aren't coming as fast as I promised, bbs. But life happened as it tends to. And I'm re-thinking act three of this fic because Civil War gave me IDEAS.

_“I assign my crooked backbone_  
_to the dice maker, to chop up into dice,_  
_for casting lots as to who shall see his own blood_  
_on his shirt front and who his brother's,_  
_for the race isn't to the swift but to the crooked.”_

\- "The Dead Shall Be Raised Incorruptible” by Galway Kinnell

 

**Baltimore - 1950**

Gabe walks into the bar wearing an honest-to-God trench coat (fur-lined, like his old bomber jacket) and fedora. He looks good, and in D.C. it makes him look like every other joe, lowers his profile. But in north Baltimore, it makes him stick out like a sore thumb.

The half dozen men hunched over the bar in their blue jeans and Carhartts turn away from their beers for the first time all night to stare.

Bucky lives in Baltimore and commutes to the SSR headquarters in D.C. because he can’t stand to live there, its people too shifty and its streets too clean. Bucky likes Baltimore’s sprawling mix of black and white, urban and suburban communities. It feels vast, like New York, easy to hide or get lost in.

“Nice place,” Jones says, looking at the dilapidated state of the bar as he slides into the booth across from Bucky. He removes his hat and gloves, and rubs his hands together.

Bucky shrugs, “It’s not bugged,” he points out, unlike his apartment. He should be used to it by now -- working for a government agency whose primary objective is to keep secrets -- but he isn’t. Some nights he can hardly stand to sleep there, feels like the walls are leaning in to listen to him breathe.

"You're drinking?" Gabe asks, nodding at what is Bucky's third scotch. It may no longer get him inebriated, but his body remembers.

"Placebo effect," Bucky explains, "You find that?"

Gabe shrugs. "Never was much of a drinker. Coffee, on the other hand."

Bucky slides out of the booth. "Billy's got you covered," he says, referring to the bar-back. "Cream and three sugars, right?"

"Please," Gabe says, finally sliding his coat off his shoulders.

Bucky would wonder aloud at Gabe’s habit of drinking coffee after sundown, but he suspects Gabe dislikes sleeping as much as he does. Each of the twenty-three Enhanced that made it out of Zola’s compound suffer from some form of combat fatigue. For Bucky, the insomnia and the nightmares are the worst. Even Dugan still gets them, and he’s been out of the field for years.

Dugan was one of the few to turn down the SSR’s offer, told Bucky, “I’ve done my time, kid. Besides, I’ve got a screeching harpy of a wife at home that I miss like Hell. “ Lucky son of a bitch.

Bucky comes back with the cup of coffee and cream in his one hand and the sugar packets in his pocket. Once Gabe takes the coffee from him, Bucky asks, "So, what have you got for me?”

Gabe is in a different branch of the SSR than Bucky -- intercepting, translating, and decoding messages, whereas Bucky's a field operative. All of Bucky's guys -- and Natasha -- have someone who feeds them information before the higher ups do. Gabe is Bucky's someone.

Gabe mummers under the sound of him shaking his sugar packets, just loud enough for Bucky to hear, “The Soviets are gonna invade South Korea.”

Bucky scoffs. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

It's been the subtext of every conversation Bucky's had or heard over the past week. Just the thought of it forces Bucky to take a deep breath against the panic itching the back of his skull.

Fucking Stalin and the horror show he’s made of communism. Bucky’s always been vocally pro-union and knew plenty of Communists growing up, but Stalinism is a whole other ball of wax. Just the idea that that man has access to an atomic bomb scares the bejeezus out of Bucky.

Becca, now living in Park Slope with her fiance, would be less than five miles from the epicenter if the Russians bombed New York. She would be far enough away that she would die slowly, over a period of several days. Internal bleeding, hemorrhaging, convulsions.

“I thought I _was_  telling you something you didn’t know. You sneaking around behind my back with another informant, Barnes?” Gabe asks, mercifully jarring Bucky from his thoughts.

Bucky snorts. “C’mon, Jones, you know you’re my best guy.”

Gabe laughs and grins his big, beautiful smile down at his coffee. “Don’t let officer Nunn hear you say that?”

“You mean Janet?”

“Yeah. Aren’t you and her...?” Gabe asks, waving a finger between Bucky and an invisible person.

“No,” Bucky says, maybe too quickly, “We’re not.”

Gabe’s nods and takes a sip of his coffee.

After a tense minute of silence during which they both drink and pretend to find the other bar patrons interesting, Gabe says, “You know, it’s been six years, Barnes. Don’t you think it’s time to--”

“Time to what?”

“To move on.”

Sweat prickles the back of Bucky’s neck. “What do you mean by that?” He asks. He knows there are agents at HQ that have been tasked with rooting out queers. Bucky’s not a fairy, not really; he’s only ever been with one guy. But tell that to anyone who finds out what he and Steve used to get up to.

If Gabe does suspect anything, he’s too good of an agent to show it. He gives Bucky a soft smile and says, “I just know it’s tough to lose a friend. You know anyone in this city? You must get lonely.”

“When you’re surrounded day in and day out by people with unclear motives, it’s kinda nice being alone.” Bucky doesn’t mean it, but it’s a sound enough justification to get Gabe off of his back.

Thankfully, Gabe nods and raises his cup of coffee, “Cheers to that.”

-

**Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn  - May, 1954**

It’s a nice day for funeral, Bucky thinks as the priest moves his hand over his pa’s casket. The sky over their bowed heads is a deep, still blue. The grass under their feet is soft and new, and the wind is calm, ruffling Bucky’s hair like an affectionate touch.

Bucky keeps his hand on his ma’s back through the service, rubbing it up and down whenever he feels it hitch with a silent sob.

She was in high spirits last night, drinking and laughing and telling stories along with everyone else. Her little apartment was crammed full of dozens of friends and neighbors, passing through to pay their respects to Bucky’s pa where he was laid out on their bed before lining up to speak with her.

Now she sways on her feet, sleep-deprived and emotionally wrung out, clutching her black shawl around her shoulders.

Becca’s on her other side, arm linked with hers. The twins are on the other side of Becca, the three of them pressed tightly together at the shoulder, forming a protective wall around their ma.

Once they’ve lowered his pa into his final resting place and the service has wrapped up, Bucky excuses himself to go visit Steve, as he does about once a year. He’s got a present for him.

When he gets back to his ma’s apartment an hour later, the girls and his ma are almost done cleaning up the detritus of the wake. They all try to sit Bucky down on the couch with a drink while they work, but Bucky’s having none of it.

He takes the wet dish and the rag out of Bae’s hands, squeezes the dish between his stump and his left pectoral, and rotates and dries it with his left. “You’re looking at a guy who can fire an M1 rifle one-handed. I’m pretty sure I can handle putting some dishes away.”

Neither his ma nor the twins seem to know what to do with this information. They clean in tense silence until Becca walks into the room, carrying a leftover casserole and cracking up over Bucky’s awkward attempt at levity.

“Thanks, Bec,” Bucky says, smiling at her.

“No problem, doofus,” Becca says, purposefully bumping into him on the way to the refrigerator.

His ma and the twins seem to relax a bit after that, shaking their heads and smiling.

“You two,” Bucky’s ma says and ruffles Bucky’s hair with a wet, soapy hand.

They cram as many leftovers as they can into his ma’s new refrigerator and eat the rest for dinner. Afterwards, Bucky excuses himself to have a smoke out on the fire escape with a couple fingers of the whiskey Francis Duffy brought over last night.

He sets the glass down at his feet, lights up, and leans a hip against the railing to watch the street below. The warmth of spring calls Brooklyn’s residents out into the street. Lace curtains shifting in open windows, boys on stoops watching girls walk by, a group of kids sketching a skelly board on the sidewalk in chalk.

Eventually, Becca joins him, picking his glass of whiskey up off the fire escape so she can take a sip. She reaches out to steal his smoke and watches him as she takes a drag.

Someday, Bucky will have to explain to her why he hasn’t aged a day in the past eleven years. He hopes to God that today isn’t that day. He doesn’t have the energy right now to come up with a convincing lie, or even do a good job of telling the truth.

Becca hands his smoke back to him and says, “You look like shit, Buck.”

Bucky takes a puff and chokes on it, coughs out, “Jesus, Bec, the mouth on you. You talk that way in front of your husband?”

“Nah, just you. That’s what happens when you grow up with a foul-mouthed older brother.” She rests her elbows on the railing next to Bucky, lets her forearms dangled. “So, what the hell are they doing to you in that place?” she asks, rocking back and forth on her heels. She never was able to sit still.

Bucky gives her a warm smile, “Nothing I can’t handle, kiddo.” If sleepless nights, stress headaches, and the near constant phantom pains in his left arm are the price he has to pay for keeping her and the rest of his family safe, he’ll endure all of it and more.

He finishes his cigarette and stamps it out on the railing. He’s ready to go back inside, but Becca doesn’t seem inclined to move.

“How dangerous is it? What you’re doing?” she asks. Dog with a bone, this one.

Bucky sighs. “Safer than the army,” he says. “I’m valuable enough to them that they don’t go needlessly putting me in harm’s way. Again, nothing I can’t handle, Bec. Nothing you need to worry about.”

She considers this for a moment before seeming to accept it with a small nod. And then she pulls out the big guns, “You like doing it?”

Bucky nearly laughs. Of course he doesn’t _like_  doing it. He doesn’t like McCarthy breathing down their necks. He doesn’t like the unknown variable that is Khrushchev. He doesn’t like the whispers he’s been hearing about what the CIA is planning to do in South America. And he sure as hell doesn’t like that he and almost all of the twenty-three other people who were experimented on by Zola have been turned into bodyguards for America’s interests abroad.

But Bucky’s not gonna sit around with his thumb up his ass while the Soviets subjugate entire continents. Ten years ago, he watched his country cower in the face of fascism while it was tearing Europe apart. They hemmed and hawed over the pros and cons in the face of pure evil, and by the time they entered the war, it was almost too late. Bucky wants no part in that kind of chicken shit political pandering.

“So if you don’t like it, why are you still doing it?” Becca asks.

It takes Bucky a second to realize he never answered her question; she can just read him that well.

Bucky picks his whiskey up, takes a sip, says, “Somebody’s gotta do it, Bec.”

“You sound like Steve.”

“Becca-”

“‘Somebody’s gotta do it,’ he says. Why does it have to be you? You’ve done your time; you served your country. There’s more to you than just being a soldier, Buck.”

 _I don’t know about that,_  Bucky thinks, but he gives Becca a warm smile and a kiss on the forehead. “Thanks, Bec,” he says.

-

Bucky spends the next few at his ma’s place, keeping her company and fixing whatever needs fixing now that his pa’s not around to do it.

He starts to get the heebie jeebies something awful a couple days into his stay. Steve is a heavy presence in everything he sees, hears, and smells.

He goes to the Horn and Hardart on Fulton -- where Steve used to stuff food into slots and wipe down tables -- to get a bite to eat with Becca. Just the smell of the place has him apologizing and asking her if they can eat someplace else. Fry oil and coffee; it used to linger on Steve’s clothes and on the small hairs on the back of his neck.

Bucky goes to mass with his ma, and they walk back to her place through an alleyway where Steve once kissed him.

They’d been walking home from church and Bucky had been spitballing about the timeline of Creation and what kinda wacky math was involved there. Steve had waited until they were in the alleyway and no one else was around, stepped right in front of Bucky, leaned up, and kissed him, briefly but deeply. In the sight of God and all of Brooklyn.

As soon as Bucky and his ma get back to her apartment, he walks right back out so he can clear his head. He buys a train ticket back to Baltimore the next day.

-

When Bucky gets back to his apartment, there are two shriveled-up flower arrangements waiting outside his door and several sympathy cards in the pile of mail just inside it. Natasha’s note is short and to-the-point and says exactly what Bucky needs to hear right now. He gives it pride of place, stands it on top of the small bookshelf beside his bed.

As he’s doing it, he notices something that wasn’t there when he left. It’s thin and white and looks a bit like the sleeve a record might come in, tucked in between The Martian Chronicles and Foundation on the top shelf.

Bucky stays still and silent for a moment, listening for ticking or the hum of a current. He sniffs the air for any trace of acidic fumes. He’s caught explosives before like this, just using his heightened senses.

When he doesn’t detect anything, he pulls the sleeve out of the bookshelf. No point in being delicate about it. If it’s attached to a device, it’s gonna explode no matter how he handles it.

It is, in fact, a record. A forty-five. And on it is scribbled a note in Clint’s aimless chicken scratch.

_"Sarge,_

_I was real sorry to hear about your pop. Hope you’re holding up okay._

_I thought this might cheer you up. I heard this guy when I was in Kansas City a couple of months ago. Crazy._

_I’ll drop you a line when I’m back in the States. A little bird told me you could use some company. But you didn’t hear that from me._

_Your friend,_

_Clint”_

_Saps_ , Bucky thinks. No doubt Gabe told Clint some sob story about Bucky holing himself up in his one bedroom like the sad bachelor that he is. But it’s nice to know that someone’s thinking of him.

He wouldn’t mind seeing Clint. They don’t spend much time together outside of the occasional op. And when Clint’s not working, he’s out on the five acre spread he’s got in far western Maryland, country boy that he is.

Bucky turns the dial on the apothecary-sized record console that he spent a grand on and almost never uses. The speakers yawn to life and the radio dial lights up like a little sunrise.

Bucky slides the forty-five down onto the spindle and drops the needle. He’s walking towards his desk and the ever-present bottle of scotch sitting on it when the song starts up.

At first, it strikes Bucky as slow. It doesn’t quite have the same pep as jazz or even rockabilly.

And then the guy’s voice comes howling out of the speakers, and a live current runs through Bucky’s body, from the top of his head right down to his toes. He shivers with it.

The bass joins the snare on the downbeat, creating a steady, heartbeat thump that has Bucky nodding his head before he even realizes what he’s doing.

No wonder Clint likes this music. With the new transistor hearing aids HQ gave him, this must blow his mind. It’s not quite like anything Bucky’s heard before. It’s like someone ground together jazz, rhythm and blues, and rockabilly to make something messier and a hundred times more potent.

Bucky grabs the bottle off of his desk, spins around, and lets his feet keep moving.

Near the end of the song, Bucky finally tunes into the lyrics -- “I'm like a one-eyed cat, Peepin' in a seafood store, Well I can look at you, ‘Til you ain't no child no more” -- and nearly spits out his scotch. That’s _filthy_.

Bucky does a little triple-step on his way back to the record console, drops the needle back to the start of the record, and turns the volume up. And then he lets his body move in a way that it hasn’t since before the war, his right hand clutching the bottle of scotch and his other, invisible hand guiding an imaginary partner.

-

**Washington, D.C. - September, 1961**

Teenagers, everywhere Bucky looks. The whole country’s crawling with them. Dancing on TV and screaming themselves hoarse at concerts and talking over people who are older and smarter than them.

There’s a whole swarm of them clogging up traffic on Washington Boulevard, driving five miles an hour in their souped-up cars and making it impossible for Bucky, Clint, and Gabe to get out of the city. Bucky knew they should’ve gotten directly on the Parkway. Now it’s gonna take them an hour to get to Strick’s.

Bucky’s slouched in the back seat of Gabe’s Mercedes, his knee propped up against the back of the driver’s seat so that he’s not jerked forward every time Gabe has to stop short.

Outside of Bucky’s window, a kid no older than thirteen with a pack of cigarettes rolled up into the sleeve of his shirt leans out his window, takes the gum out of his mouth, and throws it at a girl leaning out the window of the car in front of them.

“Real classy, kid. That’ll impress her,” Bucky says out of the corner of his mouth, but he’s smiling. He remembers doing dumber shit than that to get attention when he was a kid. Mostly Steve’s.

“You wanna go home, Barnes?” Clint teases from the front seat.

“I’m just trying to remember if my hair was ever that greasy.”

“It still is,” Gabe assures him.

Bucky leans forward to flick his ear in retaliation. He’s almost reached it when Gabe slams on the brake, sending Bucky flying face-first into the back of his head rest.

Gabe and Clint snicker. So do the kids in the car outside Bucky’s window.

Bucky just smiles out the window and waves at them, says cheerily under his breath, “I can find out where you live.”

“C’mon, Barnes, loosen up,” Clint says. “We’re celebrating, remember? We got a couple of successful missions under our belts. _Good_ missions. We’re on a roll.”

“I’m loose. I’m having fun,” Bucky insists, wriggling his shoulders and his arm to demonstrate.

Clint’s right; the past couple of missions have been good. Well-intentioned in a way that Kennedy is shaping up to be. Clint’s been in South America where Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress is getting underway. And Bucky, Jean Grey, and Isaiah Bradley have been in Ghana and Tanzania with US Ambassadors who are trying to spread goodwill for Kennedy’s Peace Corps.

A feeling of hope has wormed its way into Bucky’s heart that really has no business being there after almost twenty years of working for the U.S. government.

He’s also currently doped up on a custom opioid that Dr. Banner cooked up to counter the more dangerous side effects of Zola’s serum. He’s been pressing it into tablets and prescribing it to some of the SSR’s Enhanced, including Bucky.

Besides doing wonders for his phantom limb pain, it also gets Bucky nice and high. Dr. Banner would probably be furious if he found out that Bucky was taking it recreationally, but Bucky figures he can be forgiven for wanting to relax after twenty years of not really being able to.

He looks out the window at the cars gliding alongside them and observes, “Maybe I’m showing my age, but--”

“Never stopped you before, gramps,” Clint mumbles.

“Where the hell do these kids get the money to buy a car? When I was their age, I had to steal _ice_.”

“You want these kids to live like that?” Gabe asks him. “I thought the whole reason we were fighting was so they don’t have to. So they’ll have more opportunities than we did.”

“I thought I was fighting to prevent the obliteration of the human race. But you wanna fight so that these kids can smoke dope and eat hamburgers, you go right ahead.”

Gabe snorts and shakes his head. “Happy to hear you have such faith in the future, Barnes.”

-

Bucky hits the head as soon as they get to the bar. The tablet he took before they left the office is already starting to wear off. He pops another one and takes a piss.

When he comes out, he sees that there’s already a gang of good ol’ boys hovering to one side of the pool table, Korean War veteran hats sitting high and proud atop their heads. They’re frowning at Bucky, as if offended by the suit he’s wearing. Ironic considering Bucky was the one who insisted on coming to this dump because he didn’t feel like rubbing elbows with the swells at the Quonsett.

As Bucky gets closer to the table, he realizes that it’s not him the good ol’ boys are staring at; it’s Gabe.

Gabe and Clint aren’t paying them any attention. Clint’s shuffling the balls in the rack, and Gabe’s weighing two pool cues in his hand. Once he decides on one, he offers the discarded one to Bucky.

Bucky snorts, “Thanks, Jones.” He weighs the cue in his hand. It’ll work. He holds it between his stump and his chest and grabs the bridge.

Gabe stands at the head of the table to break, his back toward the good ol’ boys. They keep their half-dead eyes trained on him and shuffle forward a step, like a herd of zombies, as Gabe leans over.

Gabe pulls his arm back to take the shot, and the man at the head of the herd starts to hoot like a monkey. “ _Ooo ooo ooo ah ah ah_.” The rest of them pick up the refrain, baring their teeth in feral smiles.

Bucky leans the bridge up against the table, takes the pool cue in his right hand, and steps towards them, shoulders squared.

“Leave it, Barnes,” Gabe says, in a tone that stops Bucky short.

He looks over to see Gabe peering up at him, still bent over to take the shot. “That’s not how we fight,” he says, his jaw tight, as if just saying it hurts him.

 _Maybe it should be_ , Bucky wants to say. Freedom Riders are being beaten by mobs in the South, with the express permission of the police. And last month, a black man was shot and killed by a white legislator in Mississippi just for trying to vote.

But Gabe came to relax, not to fight, and Bucky’s not gonna force him to just because he’s feeling restless.

Bucky gives him a curt nod, steps back, and lets the butt of his pool cue hit the ground.

Gabe leans over to take the shot again, and just as he pulls his cue back to break, the leader of the herd reaches out and taps the end of his cue, causing it to swerve out of its trajectory.

Gabe doesn’t move from where he’s still leaned over the table, just lets his head fall until his forehead nearly touches the felt, breathes out a long sigh of disappointment.

He stands up straight, looks across the table at Bucky, and says, “You know, if _you_ start the fight, then I wouldn’t be the aggressor. I’d just be defending myself.”

Bucky gives Gabe a broad, delighted grin. He tosses his pool cue up and catches it so that he can wield the weighted end, like a baseball bat.

Behind Bucky, Clint mutters, “Hold on, let me take my hearing aids out.”

Bucky’s so excited he’s nearly hard; he hasn’t been in a real brawl since… ‘38? ‘39?

Clint puts his hearing aids and his beer down on the table and gives Bucky the thumbs up.

Bucky spins, letting the inertia move out from his core to his shoulder, elbow, wrist, into the butt of the pool cue. He aims for a less debilitating spot; he doesn’t want the fight to be over too fast. The dense wood of the cue slams into the lead good ol’ boys shoulder and he reels back, howling.

-

Despite Bucky’s best efforts not to bench anyone definitively, the fight is over fairly quickly.

“Sorry!”

“Sorry!”

“Sorry!” they all call over their shoulders as they run out the back door. Bucky tosses a wad of cash at a bartender -- who’s chasing after them -- to cover any property damage.

Bucky runs and dives into the backseat as Gabe’s steps on the gas, laughing and clutching a Korean War veteran hat to his chest.

It’s the most fun he’s had in a long time

-

Turns out, Kennedy’s good intentions can’t protect them.

A month later, the Soviets detonate a thermonuclear weapon on a remote archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. Over three thousand times the destructive power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

The next year, the United States and the Soviets come to the brink of mutually assured destruction when the Soviets start placing nuclear ballistic missiles in Cuba, just ninety miles off the coast of Florida.

Almost a year to the day later, Kennedy is riding in the back seat of a Lincoln Continental convertible on a sunny day in Dallas. He smiles out at the enthusiastic crowd that’s gathered, lifts his hand to wave at them, and gets the right side of his skull blown off.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The song Bucky listens to is ["Shake, Rattle, and Roll" by Big Joe Turner](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9wTQsAgktg). It's considered one of the first rock and roll songs. Go listen to itttt.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the Vietnam War happens to a lot of good people, and Bucky gets a clue.
> 
> Heads up for semi-graphic description of mutilation as well as conflict between different ethnic groups in Vietnam.

**En-route from the Civilian Irregular Defense Group camp in South Vietnam to Kon Tum Province - August, 1965**

The Huey drops and rises as it fights the currents of cold air coming down off Ngọc Linh. Bucky holds tight to the cargo straps overhead. Next to him, Natasha does the same without taking her eyes off the small book she’s brought with her: The Montagnard Tribes of South Vietnam. Never not taking in one source of intel or another, this one.

Across from them, Brock Rumlow -- Navy SEAL and true believer -- fondles the cross around his neck and moves his lips along to “Eight Days a Week.” For this, Bucky can’t blame him; it’s a catchy song.

The rhythm guitars ring out their final chords and, after a couple seconds of silence, a new song starts up. Just the first couple of wistful chords have both Bucky and Rumlow dropping their heads back against the walls of the cabin and groaning.

“This hippie shit again,” Rumlow growls.

“Can’t dance to it,” Bucky says, clenching his eyes shut, willing the song to stop. “I rate it a thirty-five.”

The voices on the radio mewl in harmony, _A time for pe-eace, I swear it’s not too late._

“Voice of a generation,” Natasha points out, face impassive, eyes still on the book in her lap.

“You saying you actually enjoy this?” Bucky asks, irrationally irritated. His left arm is throbbing. Doctor Banner recently cut back his opioid dosage; someone must have snitched.

“I didn’t say that. But it’s worth listening to. It’s… interesting.”

“It’s entitled bullshit,” Rumlow says to Natasha’s bent head. “All those twits in Berkeley, burning their draft cards.” He looks to Bucky. “Bet you didn’t have to deal with this shit during your war, did you, Barnes?”

Bucky considers this for a moment, and then sighs and says, “People have always protested wars. Only difference is now any schmuck with a television can watch it live and think they know what they’re seeing.”

“So what’s the alternative?” Natasha asks him, at last looking up from map at the back of her book. “The media doesn’t cover it at all? That sounds a lot like Stalinism, James.”

“You know that’s not what I’m saying, Nat,” Bucky snaps. She’s always so damned level-headed about everything. “But video footage of war isn’t _war_. You know that. And now Johnson has to worry about spinning it as much as fighting it. That makes our job harder.”

Natasha’s expression calcifies. Her lips barely move when she says, “Our job decides the fate of nations, James. And sometimes it necessitates the ending of human lives. It’s not supposed to be easy.”

Rumlow gives voice to words that Bucky has already thought better of saying: “Whose side are you on anyway, girl?” Just hearing the question out of Rumlow’s mouth instead of his own reframes it, turns it into the childish sentiment that it is.

“There are no sides. Not in this war,” Natasha says, looking back to her book. “Maybe never again.”

Her words hit Bucky with the force of a truth not yet faced. Bucky takes a deep breath and holds tighter to the cargo straps.

-

The Huey touches down in a clearing just outside a Jarai village, hidden from plain sight by a copse of coffee trees, branches drooping all the way to the ground under the weight of hand-sized leaves and sprays of red berries. It’s harvest season. This time last year, the village’s women and girls were tangled up in the branches collecting.

When Nat, Bucky, and Rumlow jump out the Huey, there’s nothing in the branches but wind. Bucky shivers, pulls his rifle off his back.

Over the past three years, teams consisting of the SSR’s Enhanced, the Navy SEALs, and the Green Berets have been training Jarai men to fight the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army.

Bucky and his team have been working with the people in this village for two years now. Every couple of months the men come down to the Civilian Irregular Defense Group Camp for additional training and intelligence exchange, but as of 0800 hours this morning, none of them had shown up.

Bucky, Nat, and Rumlow are here to find out why. The other half of Bucky’s team -- Clint, Daniel Sousa, Isaiah Bradley, and two Green Berets -- are waiting back at the camp in case the men show up.

Bucky approaches the line of coffee trees, feeling eyes on him. The trees shake as the children on watch scurry out of them and run back to the village.

The name of the girl who steps out of the trees to greet them is Tuma. At thirteen, she’s the oldest unmarried girl in the village. She offers them the flat, placating smile she’s learned from spending time with Americans and says, “You, come.” And then she turns and walks back into the trees. Bucky follows her, Nat and Rumlow following close behind.

They walk through the bamboo and barbed wire fences they’ve built around the village as a first line of defense against the VC, past stilted, thatched-roofed longhouses. Women pounding rice on the porches and pot-bellied pigs grazing on the grass below.

At last, they’re approached by a familiar face, Touneh, one of the men on their team. “Welcome,” he says, without his usual smile. And then he says in Jarai, “I am sorry we couldn’t come to the camp.” He gestures them forward with his hand. “Come. I need to show you something.”

He leads them to the opposite edge of the village where a rectangular patch of earth has been dug up, carved wooden posts stuck into each corner. Two men lie supine in the middle of the recently-turned-over earth, a village elder speaking over them.

When they reach the edge of the rectangle, Bucky sees that the two men lying in the middle of it are Glum and Nhong, members of his team.

They’re dead, both of their necks ringed by a line of thick, black stitches.

Behind him, Natasha utters a soft, “My god,” and Rumlow begins to recite the Our Father. Even Bucky crosses himself instinctively.

Glum and Nhong’s heads have been severed and reattached to their bodies. Bucky’s seen this before. The Viet Cong sometimes sometimes cut off their victims’ heads, mount them on pikes, and leave them to be found.

“We were ambushed while we were out on patrol two days ago.” Touneh says. “Glum and Nhong were taken by the Viet Cong. Yesterday we found them,” His voice is heavy with shame, and hearing it compounds the guilt that’s dropped into the pit of Bucky’s stomach.

Touneh is a sub-chief in this village and is proud of his and his men’s contribution to this war. He takes every loss they suffer and every unsuccessful mission as a personal failure.

“I’m so sorry, Touneh,” Nat says. “They were good soldiers. And good men.”

Bucky sees a middle-aged woman marching toward them over Touneh’s shoulder. As she approaches, Touneh steps aside and bows his head in deference to her. He explains, “This is Djo, Nhong’s grandmother.”

He’s barely finished speaking before Djo cuts in, speaking fast and angry, “Nhong is the third member of our family that we’ve lost. We can’t afford to make a sacrifice for him, so we can’t give him a proper funeral. We’ll have to wait over a year.”

Bucky remembers having to wait four months to bury Steve, and his heart hurts on her behalf. “I’m sorry,” he says in Jarai.

“The young men in this village don’t remember,” she continues, ignoring him, “but I do. First, the French promised us autonomy if we fought for them. Then, the Viet Cong did. Now, you are promising us the same thing. I hope that you keep your promise.”

Her words will haunt Bucky years later, knowing as he will then what happens to Touneh and most of the people in this village.

But in that moment, Bucky knows that Natasha is right: in this war, there are no sides. And that means there are no winners.

-

**Washington, D.C. - Spring, 1966**

There are two Enhanced in New York City -- one in Hell’s Kitchen and one in Harlem. They’re causing excitement among the black members of the community and striking fear into the hearts of the white ones. The white ones who enjoy harassing black people, that is. That’s not in the report, but Bucky can read between the lines.

They both showed up separately on the FBI’s radar about five months ago. And now they’ve started working together. A black man and a black woman.

The FBI has been able to narrow down who the man might be to two captives that came out of Zola’s prison. Unluckily for Peggy, only one black woman was experimented on by Zola. But luckily for her, this folder got dropped on Bucky’s desk.

Bucky wouldn’t be surprised if Director Fury did it on purpose given his growing distrust of both the FBI and the CIA.

While Bucky wishes he’d found out some other way, he’s happy to know that Peggy’s still alive and kicking. She dropped off the map about ten years ago. The SSR flat-out refused to hire a black woman as an agent, despite her being enhanced and having successfully planned and executed a hostile extraction.

The SSR brought her on as a secretary, but she quit after two years. The job was beneath her, especially with what she was now capable of.

On the drive back to Baltimore, Bucky stops at a phone booth in Elkridge and calls a friend, asks her to call Peggy.

That night at exactly 9:00 pm, Bucky’s leaning inside a phone booth a couple neighborhoods away from his apartment when the phone rings.

He picks it up, says, “Hey, you at a phone booth?

“Of course I am. I may not work in the hallowed halls of the SSR, but I’m not stupid,” Peggy says from the other end, still full of moxie after all these years.

Bucky smiles into the receiver. “God, it’s good to hear your voice.”

“I would say it’s good to hear yours too,” Peggy says, tone warm despite her words, “but I suspect I know why you’re calling me.”

Bucky holds the receiver between his ear and his shoulder, grabs his pack of smokes out of his pocket, and shakes one out. “You’d be partly right. Mostly I just wanted to make sure you’re okay.”

Peggy sighs, “I appreciate the sentiment, James, but I’m hardly the one who needs looking after. There are others who are much more vulnerable than me given the state of the union.”

Jesus, no wonder Steve was sweet on her.

“So, I’m guessing that’s a ‘yes?’” Bucky asks her, lighting up and holding his cigarette between his teeth so he can put his Zippo away.

“That’s a ‘yes,’” Peggy says. Bucky can hear her smile over the line.

“You got people watching your back?”

“I do. Good people. Well, ‘good’ is a relative term, but they’re good at what they do. And I trust them.”

“Good. Good,” Bucky says, nodding. That’s really all he wants to know, but he doesn’t want to get off the phone with her yet. It’s good to talk to someone who got out of the game before everything went sideways, someone who’s doing something they really believe in. He keeps talking, “The Feds give you any trouble, you just let me know. I’ll take care of it.”

“I don’t want you risking your job for me, James.”

Bucky laughs, almost choking on smoke. “Peg, I don’t care about my job. Besides, with my Army retirement pay plus my salary, I’ve got more money than God now.” He crosses himself. “They fire me, I’ll disappear. Go to South America. Make myself useful killing some Nazis.”

Peggy is silent for a moment before she says, voice deep with concern, “James, are you alright?”

Bucky opens his mouth, closes it, and opens it again to say, “I don’t know.” He takes a final drag on his cigarette, stubs it out on the sole of his shoe, and flicks it onto the sidewalk.

On the other end of the line, Peggy is silent, but she makes no indication of wanting to end the conversation.

Maybe that’s why he keeps talking, spouting sentiment that he usually keeps in his head, where it belongs. “You know, I was twenty-four when I shipped out. I thought I was an adult. Thought I was  _old_.”

Peggy laughs, loud and sudden, as if she’s surprised herself.

Bucky smiles and continues, “It gets worse. I thought I’d get smarter as I got older. I thought I _was_ getting smarter. But I think I’m just getting angrier.” Bucky grabs his pack of smokes again, shakes another one out. “I don’t think I’ve felt anything but scared or angry for twenty years.”

“I’m not sure that I have either,” Peggy says.

Bucky takes a long drag of his cigarette, says, “The only thing I ever wanted was to do right by the people I loved. But I think I stopped doing that a long time ago. And worse than that, I don’t think they need me anymore.” Becca and the twins are married and have families of their own. His ma is re-married. And Steve. Despite Bucky’s subconscious denial, Steve is gone.

“The world’s changing, James. As it tends to do,” Peggy says. “And sometimes it changes too drastically for us to change along with it. I think the best anyone can do in that case is to start over.”

“I’ve done a lot of shit I’m not proud of, Peg,” Bucky says. Maybe he missed his chance to do the right thing when he joined the SSR (for no other reason besides being adrift with grief after Steve died). Maybe outliving Steve was his chance to start over, to do something truly great with his life, the way Steve would have. And he fucked that up royally.

“Maybe I don’t deserve to start over,” he says.

Peggy says, gentle, “Of course you do, James. You’re one of the best men I know.”

Some heavy emotion gets stuck in Bucky’s throat, and he swallows to dislodge it, only for it to harden and block his throat. He stares down at the floor of the phone booth, the smoke from his cigarette curling up from where it hangs limply at his side. “Do you miss him, Peg?” he asks.

Peggy is silent for a moment before she says slowly, carefully choosing each word as she says it, “I think of him often. He wasn’t like anyone else I’d ever met, or anyone I’ve met since. I sometimes think that if he’d lived, the world would be a very different place.”

Bucky forces himself to take a deep breath, drops his cigarette onto the floor of the phone booth and presses the still-smoking butt out with the heel of his shoe. “You and me both, sister.”

After a pause, Peggy asks him, “What are you doing this weekend?”

Bucky shrugs, says, “I dunno. Why?”

“Why don’t you come up to New York? Come see what I’ve been working on,” she says.

“It’s probably best if I don’t get involved in what you’re doing, Peg.”

Peggy snorts. “Don’t be ridiculous. I’m talking about something else, something I think you’d find interesting.”

And, really, what else is Bucky gonna do this weekend? Besides loiter outside Leon’s or one of the other queer bars in Baltimore and wonder what the fuck he’s doing there? Trawl the surrounding blocks in the hopes of bumping into an interested fella?

Since Bucky’s cut back on the opioids, sex is the only thing that scratches the itch. And sex with men has been doing it for him in a way that sex with women hasn’t. Probably best if he drops that habit sooner than later.

“Yeah,” he tells Peggy, “Alright.”

-

Peggy instructs Bucky to meet her at a diner in lower Manhattan, a few blocks from where she works as a secretary. When he gets there, she’s sitting in a booth, drinking coffee with a short, white guy. The guy gestures at her chest excitedly and then links his fingers together, says something over them that Bucky can just barely hear over the noise in the restaurant -- something about armor.

When Peggy spots Bucky, she smiles and gestures him over with an upward tick of her head. She looks good, different. She’s let her hair grow out natural, and she’s not wearing any makeup. Seeing the way women dress themselves down these days -- and dress up in order to look dressed down -- is a trip.

The kid sitting across from Peggy doesn’t stop talking even when Bucky approaches the table and stands right next to him. Peggy smiles at the kid, amused, and says, “Tony.” She gestures with her eyes up at Bucky, trying to redirect his attention. “This is my friend, officer James Barnes.”

Tony whips his head around to look at Bucky, just now registering his presence. He jumps up out of his seat to shake Bucky’s hand, knocks his hip against the table in his over-excited state, and nearly spills his coffee. He pays it no attention, focus now entirely on Bucky.

Up close, Bucky realizes how young he is, eighteen at the oldest. He’s got lank, black hair that flips up at the bottom, blue-tinted aviator shades sitting low on his nose, and bloodshot blue eyes. He either hasn’t slept in a couple of days, or he’s stoned, maybe both. He grabs Bucky’s hand to shake it, says, “Hey, man. Tony Stark.”

The last name is a sweet but chalky taste on the back of Bucky’s tongue, but it takes him a full minute to remember why: the D ration. “Is that ‘Stark’ like the chocolate bar?” he asks the kid, amused.

The kid bristles, shoulders jumping up defensively before he catches himself and lowers them. He tilts his chin up, all youthful bluster. “You mean the ration that saved tens of thousands of lives and helped the Allies win the war? Yeah, ‘Stark’ like the chocolate bar.”

Bucky concedes with a grin and a nod. “You’re not wrong. Good to meet you, Tony.”

Stark ignores Bucky’s sentiment, dropping Bucky’s hand to go back to the table and take Peggy’s. “Gotta split,” he says, lifting her hand to his lips and kissing it. “Always a pleasure, Ms. Carter. I’ll be in touch.”

Peggy gives him an indulgent smile over their joined hands. “See you on Monday, Tony.”

Stark tosses a twenty on the table and beats it, leaving a cloud of Old Spice in his wake.

Peggy stands to slip into her coat, and Bucky leans close to ask her, “You robbing the cradle, Carter?” Only sort of kidding.

She says over her shoulder, “I’ll tell you about it when you’re older, Barnes,” and leads them out of the diner.

She takes Bucky to the basement of a church on the Lower East Side. They walk down a half-flight of brown carpeted steps, through a door that’s missing its knob, and into a room filled with over a dozen kids, squealing and chasing each other down aisles created by folding chairs.

Chatting in small groups along the walls of the room are about fifteen women of various ages. A couple have babies on their chests or toddlers on their hips. All are blinking hard or rubbing their eyes with exhaustion.

Bucky takes a quick look around the room to affirm his initial assessment: not a man in sight.

“Peg, are you sure I should be here?” he asks her under his breath.

“You said you wanted to start over. I think this may be a good place to start,” Peggy says to him. “You know these women. You just haven’t met them yet.”

A brunette in her mid-forties -- the only other white person there -- waves at them from where she’s standing in the corner of the room. Peggy catches sight of her, startles, and makes a beeline toward her, leaving Bucky alone.

“You must be the do-gooder Peggy told us about,” says a voice from Bucky’s left. Bucky turns to see a tall, young black woman coming toward him. Blue jeans with baby food smudges on them and a red bandana tied around her head. “Welcome to Women for Welfare Equality,” she says and takes his hand, squeezing it punishingly hard. “My name’s Gloria. And you are?”

“James Barnes, ma’am,” Bucky says. “Thank you for having me.”

She nods, looks him up and down in a quick, expressionless assessment, and says, “Probably best if you just listen during this first meeting.” She gestures to the rows of folding chairs. “Take a seat. We’re about to start.”

Bucky takes a seat in the back row, behind Peggy.

Gloria stands at the front of the room. Once everyone has settled and quieted down, she says, voice ringing out in the small room, “This time last year, I was stealing food out of the trash so I could feed my kids.”

The other women in the room hum in agreement. Gloria’s eyes meet Bucky’s, daring him to judge her, and he gives her a deep nod, understanding.

Bucky’s family was just financially secure enough that they were able to scrape by during the Depression without resorting to drastic measures, but Steve and his ma weren’t so lucky. And even after Roosevelt expanded government assistance for children, Steve’s ma refused to take it. Hell, no one in their neighborhood took it. Taking charity from anywhere but the church got you labeled an unfit mother, could get your kids taken away from you.

More than once, Bucky stole so that Steve and his ma could eat, so that Steve didn’t have to. Not many people survived the Depression with their dignity and the fate of their soul intact. But Bucky made damn sure that Steve did.

And that’s what Gloria wants: to live with dignity, to not have her morals called into question. She tells them she’s got a caseworker that stops by her apartment unannounced in the middle of the night to make sure she doesn’t have a man in the house. Because if she did, then not only would she be an unfit mother for having sex outside of marriage, she’d be taking advantage of the system. Her man should be supporting her, not the state.

Bucky remembers people in the neighborhood gossiping about Steve’s mom. A boy shouldn’t grow up without a father, they’d say. Sarah shouldn’t try to be both mother and father to that poor boy, they’d say.

Peggy was right; Bucky’s never met these women, but he knows them.

-

When Bucky’s not working at HQ or abroad in Vietnam doing a job he increasingly hates, he’s up in New York, helping the movement in any way he can. He even gets himself an apartment in Midtown to crash in on weekends.

It grows surprisingly quickly, especially after Reverend King voices his support. Women for Welfare Equality writes pamphlets and canvases neighborhoods, educating welfare recipients about their rights, encouraging mothers to accept assistance without shame. They petition the state legislature for easier access to assistance and for laws that would limit the power of caseworkers.

The volume of their collective voices grows as they join up with the other welfare rights groups that start popping up, first across the city, and then across the country.

 

**New York - Autumn, 1967**

They’re up in Spanish Harlem in the the cafeteria of a soup kitchen, dozens of men and women from several groups across the city crammed into folding cafeteria tables and standing along the walls.

Twenty minutes into the meeting, the front entrance of the soup kitchen slams open. Bucky’s on his feet immediately, prepared to face down whoever’s come to cause trouble, whether it’s the NYPD come to break them up or some backwards-thinking citizenry.

Through the doorway stomps a young man, muttering under his breath and swiping at the trickle of blood coming out of his left nostril, smearing it all over his puffy upper lip. The skin around the bridge of his nose is beginning to purple, and his left cheek is mottled red and starting to swell.

He freezes once he catches onto the fact that the room has gone silent and everyone is staring at him. He looks up, then ducks his head a little in embarrassment. “Shit,” he breathes. “Lo siento. Sorry,” he says to the room at large.

Across the cafeteria table from Bucky, the contingent of Puerto Rican mothers (Karla, Ángela, Gina, and Isabel) shake their heads in disapproval.

The young man starts to creep sideways, pointing towards the chrome double doors that lead to the kitchen. “I’ll just--,” and then he turns fully and scoots through them.

Peggy pushes herself away from the cafeteria table and stands to go after him.

Led by a pull in his chest, Bucky steps forward to follow them. He looks across the table at Angie -- Peggy’s roommate, the forty-something brunette who was at Bucky’s first meeting -- and tries to explain himself. “I’m gonna go make sure everything’s okay,” he says.

Angie, smirking up at him as if she knows something Bucky doesn’t, says, “Good luck with that, Barnes.”

The cafeteria begins to fill up with voices again as Bucky walks towards the kitchen. He slips through the double doors to see the young man slouched spread-legged on a plastic chair, poking at the bridge of his nose. With his chest and his head tilted back, his half-unbuttoned jean shirt falls open to reveal smooth olive skin and a small gold cross sitting on his sternum. Wide-set dark eyes and brown hair falling in waves to his shoulders. At the sight of him, spread out and indolent, the pull on Bucky’s body redirects itself to a much more telling spot.

Peggy’s standing over the sink, running a paper towel under steaming-hot water. She squeezes it out, then walks over to the industrial-sized freezer to grab a plastic bag of frozen vegetables out of it. She kicks the door shut and strides back towards the young man, grumbling, “Fuck’s sake, Manny. Over a _look_.”

“I know that look, Peg,” Manny says, sitting up and taking the bag of vegetables from Peggy to press it to the bridge of his nose.

Their movements anticipate each other’s, as if this is something they’ve done many times before.

Peggy sighs. “And what did that look say?”

“Called me a bad word,” Manny says, just a hint of humor lifting his tone. Peggy begins to wipe away the blood from under his nose, and he frowns and winces, babyish. The pain seems to rally him a bit, and he spits, “Can’t just come into my neighborhood, threaten me, and expect to walk out--” He stops abruptly when he catches sight of Bucky over Peggy’s shoulder.

His eyes do a quick sweep up and down Bucky’s body, and he says, not quiet, “Holy shit.”

Bucky finds himself flushing and smiling. Coming up, he got a lot of appreciative looks from both men and women. Men especially were sometimes so brazen that he’d snarl at them in self-defense. He never thought he’d miss it. But people don’t usually look an amputee the way they would a strong and bright-eyed young man.

Manny’s mouth spreads into a delighted grin, and he murmurs, “Where you been hiding him, Peg?”

Peggy sighs and says, “Away from you.”

Manny’s eyes light up. “Why? Is he dangerous?”

Bucky chuckles, and answers for her, keeps his voice an octave lower than usual when he says, “Deadly.”

-

Manny slides out from underneath Bucky’s arm, leaving the overheated spot where he’s been resting on Bucky’s chest suddenly cold and rousing Bucky from his post-coital doze.

Bucky lifts one eye open to see Manny leaning over the edge of bed and slowly coming back up, Converse in hand, eyes focused on the opposite wall of the motel room on West 84th they’ve reserved for the next couple of hours.

Bucky follows his gaze to see a cockroach that’s probably just scurried out of the light fixture. Damn kid spotted it before Bucky did.

Bucky smiles lazily and murmurs, “Distance two meters. Winds out of the--” Bucky eyes the open window to their left, through which spills the sound of cars honking and neighbors screaming at each other. “South. Approximately five miles an hour.”

Manny smiles, mutters, “Thanks, Sarge.” He pulls his arm back just a touch and lets his sneaker fly. It’s trajectory anticipates the cockroach’s hasty retreat, splatting it against the wall on its way back to the safety of the light fixture.

Manny punches both fists in the air and lets out a joyous, “Ha- _ha_!”

Bucky grins, hooks his arm around Manny’s middle, and pulls him down onto the mattress. He turns them so that Manny’s on his left, so that he can reach down with his right hand to stroke Manny’s cock.

Manny huffs out a laugh and groans, “Cool it, Barnes. Not everyone has your stamina.” But he thrusts his hips up into Bucky’s fist and shuffles toward Bucky on the mattress so he can kiss on his throat.

They’re getting a good rhythm going -- Manny jerking Bucky’s cock, heat and speed building in the space between their chests, making them sweat -- when roach number two scurries out from behind the light fixture. Bucky ignores it, focused on Manny’s mouth, but Manny sees it and growls.

He jumps out of bed, stalks over to the wall, and slams his fist into it. He misses the roach by a mile, howls, “Fuck,” and shakes his hand out, like he’s surprised by what happens when you punch something that’s about a hundred times stronger than your fist.

“Smooth move, genius,” Bucky grumbles, blood up and still aching hard. He rolls over toward the bedside table to grab a smoke.

Manny’s a Marine, joined up to get the money to go to college. He served almost four years in Vietnam before being discharged last summer when he contracted malaria. He’s seen some real bad shit, and like any vet, he’s a jumpy son of a bitch.

“Fucking sick of living like this,” Manny snarls. And then he’s turning his ire on Bucky. “Why can’t we ever fuck at your place?”

Bucky lights his smoke with Manny’s box of matches, takes a deep drag. “I told you. It’s probably bugged. And it’s none of the SSR’s business who I go home with.”

Manny tilts his head at him. “Who _do_ you go home with, Barnes?”

Bucky opens his mouth to ask him what the hell he’s talking about, and then something occurs to him and his stomach drops. “You asking if I’m sleeping with other people? Manny, if you’re looking for something serious--”

“No, man. I don’t care about that.” Manny walks over to pick up Bucky’s pack of Luckys. “I’m just wondering if you fuck women.”

Good God, whatever happened to tact?

Bucky taps the end of his cigarette into the ashtray. “I have, yeah. Don’t see how it’s any of your business.”

Manny starts to pull one of Bucky’s cigarettes out of his pack before he freezes, frowns, and tosses the pack back onto the bedside table. “It’s not. But I got a nasty habit of sticking my nose where it doesn’t belong.” He grabs the matchbox off the bedside table, grabs a match out of it, and places it between his lips. “You don’t talk about them, you don’t seem to notice them whenever we go out. You’ve never mentioned any ex-girlfriends. And you’ve never been married, which is strange for a guy who’s lucky enough to like both boys and girls, to stop the rumors, if nothing else. So I’m wondering: do you like girls?”

Bucky shrugs. “Sure.”

True, Bucky only ever had two steadies. In ‘35 there was Marlene. She was a riot. Whip smart, like Kate Hepburn. And in the winter of ‘36 and spring of ‘37 there was Ruth. She was a stormy-eyed, angry little thing, kinda like Steve.

But he went out with lots of girls. He loved seeing them get all dolled up, excited and pleased with how they looked. He loved talking to them, drinking with them, dancing with them.

Manny chuckles, his eyes closing the his head dropping forward. “That’s not a question you answer ‘sure’ to, Barnes,” he says, amused, like Bucky’s a child who’s done something funny. “I mean, do you ever get hard just looking at a woman? You ever met one you just had to get with? Felt like you’d die if you didn’t?”

Bucky opens his mouth to answer in the affirmative, but the only person that comes to mind is Steve. Steve’s blue eyes and his pink mouth. His deep voice and his crooked smile.

Bucky’s desire for Steve was a blaze that snuffed out all lesser flames.

And none of the girls he went out with ever led Bucky around by his dick the way Manny does. Bucky’s not an idiot; that makes a pattern.

Bucky stares down at the cigarette in his hand that he’s forgotten to smoke, says, “You’re asking me if I’m queer.”

Manny frowns around the match that he’s chewed into splinters. “Well… yeah,” he says.

Bucky stamps his cigarette out in the ashtray, suddenly exhausted. He reaches his right arm around his chest to scratch his left and says, “Would you make fun of me if I told you I wasn’t sure?”

Manny deflates then, shoulders dropping. “No,” he says, gentle. He sits down on the bed in front of Bucky and takes his hand. “Sorry, cariño. I’m a jackass.”

Bucky looks down at Manny holding his hand, rubbing the skin between his thumb and forefinger.

Bucky used to touch Steve like this. Steve would drop his pencil while drawing, shake his hand out like it was on fire, and Bucky would take it to massage the cramp out of it. He’d crack Steve’s knuckles for him, rub Vaseline into Steve’s callouses so they didn’t crack during the winter. All despite Steve’s protests about not needing to be babied. But it wasn’t for Steve; it was for Bucky, because he just had to touch him, dig his fingers in hard to feel the bones of him.

“His name was Steve,” Bucky says, not knowing why. And something in him breaks and lifts, buoyant, to say his name out loud after all these years of silence.

“You loved him?” Manny asks.

Bucky sighs, pulls his hand out of Manny’s grip, and leans back against the headboard. “You kids and your obsession with love. You know why you all toss that word around so freely? Because you can afford to.”

Manny’s brows draw together, and he opens his mouth to speak. But Bucky steamrolls over whatever he’s about to say. “When Steve and I were coming up, not everyone could afford to spend their life with the person they loved. So you found the next best thing, and you got married. You got married, you had kids. You had kids, you had someone to support you when you got old. You didn’t have someone to support you when you got old? You died quicker and you died alone. And Steve sure as hell didn’t deserve that.”

Manny doesn’t look terribly impressed. And maybe he shouldn’t be; maybe Bucky’s words are just the outdated ramblings of an old man.

Manny says, “You didn’t answer my question.”

Bucky grabs another cigarette from his pack, rolls it between his fingers, doesn’t light it. “Of course I loved him,” he says. He still wakes up in the spring of 1942. Wrapped around Steve in some ridiculous and uncomfortable position that facilitates them touching in as many places as possible, his face mashed into the silky blonde hair under Steve’s arms where he smells strongest, like he does between his legs. It’s been twenty-five years. “I couldn’t imagine my life without him, and I still can’t. But what does it matter? Wasn’t like one of us was going to magically turn into a dame and start popping out kids.”

After a moment of silence, Manny says, “I’m sorry, Bucky.”

Bucky shrugs. “Well, we don’t always get what we want, do we?”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [my tumblrrrrr](http://mynameisbucky.tumblr.com/)


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bucky continues to slog his way through the latter half of the 20th century. And we get a brief peak at what a certain someone has been up to all these years.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about the delay bbs! I was on Stucky Big Bang beta duty.
> 
> Heads-up for new tags: police brutality (not graphic) and the AIDS Crisis (fairly graphic).

**Baltimore - Spring, 1968**

His phone ringing loud enough to shake his bedside table keeps jarring Bucky out of sleep. He would turn it down if he didn’t keep passing back out as soon as it stopped.

He got back from Andrews at three a.m. Before that he was stuck on a Herc for a twenty-four flight from Danang to D.C.

When he finally rouses, just as the sun’s going down, he calls the SSR’s answering service to see of there are any messages for him. Nothing. Must have been a personal call.

He doesn’t have long to wonder about who it could have been before his phone rings again. He picks it up, and waits for whoever’s calling him to speak first.

Out of the receiver comes his name, “James,” drawn out into a tremulous sob. It’s Peggy’s voice.

Bucky shoves the receiver between his ear and shoulder, grabs the cradle, and rushes toward his closet, where his gun safe is. “Where are you? What happened?” he asks, throwing open his closet and spinning the dial on the safe.

“They killed him,” Peggy rasps, as if it’s painful to push the words through her throat. “James, they shot him.”

Bucky’s hand is steady as he turns the safe dial. 37-83-5-- “Can you tell me who? Just stay where you are, okay? I’m coming to you.”

A long moment of silence, and then Peggy says, almost a whisper, “They shot Reverend King.”

Bucky’s hand freezes where it was about to pick up his Browning. He lets himself drop to the floor on his ass, the phone cradle jangling as it plonks down next to him.

The shadowed part of Bucky’s soul that’s grown more aggressive from being so often proved right, whispers, _Told you so_.

If it hadn’t been a possibility, why were they all praying so hard for his preservation?

“He was in Memphis, speaking to sanitation workers,” Peggy says, clearing her throat, collecting herself. “He was on his hotel balcony--”

“Who did it?” Bucky asks.

“They don’t know. But the FBI are looking for him.” Peggy repeats it, reassuring him, “They _are_ looking for him.”

“Good,” Bucky says, still not entirely convinced that they’ll do a thorough job and itching to do something about it.

As if reading Bucky’s thoughts, Peggy says, “Stay where you are. It’s best not to travel right now. I’m not going anywhere if I can help it. They’re already protesting in D.C. and Cincinnati.”

Bucky takes a deep breath, looks skyward. He doesn’t like the idea of sitting on his ass and doing nothing. “You’re sure you’re alright?” He asks Peggy. “You need anything?”

After a moment of silence, Peggy says, “I needed _him_. We needed him.”

They riot in Chicago, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Trenton.

For two days Baltimore is quiet; the local media smugly declares that Baltimore’s black citizens are too “well-behaved” too riot.

On the evening of the second day, during an otherwise peaceful memorial service in Reverend King’s honor, a couple of kids start smashing in windows on Gay Street. The State Police and the National Guard are called in, but that only makes people angry.

Within twenty-four hours, five people are dead.

When the looting starts, the cops respond by shooting to kill. Self-appointed citizen snipers crouch on rooftops and shoot back.

The city burns, starting in the poorer areas of the city on the east side and moving west. No one knows who’s starting the fires or where they’re going to strike next. They spew up, seemingly out of the ground, to eat entire city blocks.

Five days into it, Johnson signs the Fair Housing Act into law, guaranteeing equal housing to everyone regardless of race.

Bucky calls Peggy up, and they watch it on the television together. Johnson addresses the nation on the responsibility of freedom, his eyes huge and squinting with earnestness behind his Coke bottle glasses.

Outside of Bucky’s window, the sky is a dirty yellow, the smoke so thick that the sun can’t get through.

For a year afterward, on days when the wind blows in strong from the Chesapeake, he can still smell smoke.

-

**February, 1971**

Nixon’s unchecked paranoia ruins a lot of good people’s lives. Men and women whom Bucky has fought alongside for decades are first smeared and then fired if Nixon so much as suspects them of being anti-war or Black Power movement sympathizers.

They toss Bruce out on his ass for being a pacifist.

Then, they try to do the same to Natasha for being Russian -- bad idea.

She uses the opportunity to take down several people who’ve had it coming. Eventually, the administration wises up, cuts her a check so she’ll stop making counter-moves, and sets her up with a cushy op overseas.

Gabe is next; they accuse him of all manner of treason before firing him. The day that they do, Bucky hands in the resignation that’s been sitting in his typewriter at home for over a month.

It’s funny, all these years they’ve been scared that the Soviets would infiltrate their ranks, eat away at everything they’ve been working toward from the inside, like a cancer. Turns out, no boogeyman could do as much damage as their own fear.

Bucky joins the Peace Corps for a two year stint -- partly as a fuck-you to Nixon who hates the program almost as much as he hates hippies -- and then joins Volunteers in Service to America for another couple of years, serving his country and probably doing more good than he ever did in the SSR.

In ‘75 he interviews for and gets a job at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, in Section 8 housing management.

He doesn’t have a lot of friends down in D.C., so every couple of week he comes up to New York so that Manny can drag him out to the clubs in the West Village: Boots and Saddles, the Anvil, 12 West -- the less kinky places where he doesn’t feel so inept. He converts to disco, dances himself sore, and becomes more fluent in the language of sex with other men.

Bucky never knew there were so many blue-collar queers. The only ones he encountered growing up were drag performers and moneyed, older men with soft hands and college educations.

And even they were hard to find by the time Bucky reached his late teens. As the Depression stretched on into a decade, it ground people down into their baser, less-tolerant instincts.

The drag balls shut down, bars were raided, the sailors and their companions that used to frequent the automat where Steve worked the late shift disappeared. And guys like Bucky -- with tough jobs and religious families -- who could blend in, did, kept their heads down and their mouths shut.

Now, cops, construction workers, factory workers, and cab drivers who’ve either been hiding in plain sight or just plain hiding fill the West Village. They hold hands in the street; they march. There are a lot of them. And they’re loud.

Bucky tries to be grateful and not bitter that change came forty years too late for him and Steve. Sometimes, it works. Sometimes he goes back to D.C. on Monday mornings feeling nothing but sorry for himself.

Every once in awhile, he goes out for dinner and drinks with Gabe and Clint. Gabe is married now, to a librarian. And so is Clint, to a nice gal named Flora who works at one of the peep shows in Times Square. It’s his third marriage in six years, but hey, at least he’s trying.

-

**Washington, D.C. - July, 1977**

The temperature hasn’t dropped below ninety degrees in over a week, and Bucky’s given up. He’s got all of his windows open, three fans going, and is down to just his underwear and a wet towel draped over his head. He’s ironing a button down for his interview tomorrow for an executive position at the Department of Housing. Sweat drips from his armpits and off the tip of his chin, lands in spreading wet spots on his shirt that hiss as the iron passes over them.

On the television in front of him, Barbarino is teaching Horshack to dance while Mr. Kotter watches, laughing behind his hand. They’re interrupted by Walter Cronkite with a special news report. Apparently, a man in a flying metal suit has been rescuing people stranded by the flooding in Johnstown, Pennsylvania.

Bucky looks up, not believing his ears, and finds that he can’t look away from what he sees. He picks the iron up off his shirt before he burns it.

Some lunatic wearing what looks like a bulky Tin Man costume is, contrary to all the laws of physics, flying through the sky over Johnstown, swooping down to pick people up off of rooftops.

Then the camera flash pans to a woman lifting the wall of a house off a huddling family, and Bucky shouts at his tv, “What the fuck?”

She’s got her back to the camera, but Bucky would know Peggy anywhere.

-

Bucky still meets up with Gabe and Clint on occasion, so he hears about it when they start finding them: people who were born with powers or who acquired them through some means other than Zola.

A German holocaust survivor who can bend metal with his mind. A kid in Harlem who can talk to birds. A girl in Cairo who can control the weather.

In response to the government’s desire to keep an eye on them and, if possible, bring them into the fold, the SSR has expanded. President Carter has been pumping money into the agency since he got into office.

It shows in the renovations. Wood and fabric have been replaced with vinyl and synthetics. The walls of the meeting room they’re sitting in are a jarring mustard yellow, and the chair that Bucky’s sitting in makes a better sculpture than a piece of furniture. He gives up and leans forward and out of it, places his elbow on the conference table.

Next to him, Tony is using too many words to describe something that’s actually pretty simple: he wants to install a mobile telephone system in his suit. It’s technology that the Russians have been using for over a decade.

“So, it’s an Altai phone,” Bucky says.

Tony clenches his jaw, and takes a deep breath. “No. Look, I’ll try to use smaller words so you can keep up, alright?” Tony moves invisible objects around the table with the tips of his fingers in an attempt to illustrate. “The Altai phone uses mobile nodes that need to connect to a landline. AMPS operates _entirely_ on a cellular frequency, in the 800 megahertz band. Separate frequencies for each user are assigned based on signal strength from a given cell tower, so the same frequency can be reused in various locations without interference.”

“Aren’t many cell towers though, are there? What happens when you’re outside of a major metropolitan area?” Bucky asks.

“I’m working on that,” Tony says, harried. “Jesus, Barnes, you’re worse than my dad.”

Bucky flashes him a smile. “I’m just busting your chops, kid. Sounds real groovy.”

In the seat next to Bucky, Natasha is asleep, her hands folded neatly in her lap, her face impassive, and her breathing shallow. All she needs is a cape and she’d be the spitting image of a vampire.

On the other side of Tony, Luke Cage is using this time to balance his books. He looks back and forth between a giant ledger and a pile of receipts, brow furrowed in concentration.

Gabe has taken the (also mustard-yellow) telephone that was sitting in the middle of conference table to the corner of the room so he can quietly and calmly talk one of his junior officers through something.

After almost forty minutes of keeping them waiting, Fury walks in. Behind him is Peggy. She gives Bucky a quick look and a coy smile and sits down across the table from him.

Fury stands just in front of the doorway, hands clasped together behind his back. His eye darts around the room to take in everyone and their various activities. He sighs and says, “Not exactly the group bonding I was hoping for.”

“I’ll bond when I get paid to do it,” Luke says, not looking up from where he’s writing in his ledger. “But until then, I got a bar to run.”

Fury nods in acknowledgement then strides over to the corner of the room to take the phone out of Gabe’s hand and say into the receiver, “He’ll have to call you back.” He hangs up and carries the phone with him to the conference table where he sits down next to Peggy.

Gabe sighs and joins the rest of the group.

Luke closes his ledger and folds his hands together in front of him.

Natasha blinks her eyes open, immediately awake, and sits up in her chair.

Everyone is silent, waiting for Fury to speak. But Fury is looking at Bucky.

Bucky sighs and sits forward in his seat. “So,” he says, and looks at each person seated around the table in turn. “Black Widow, Iron Man, _Power_ Man, Falcon, Union Jane. Nice to meet you all." He looks across the table at Fury. "The National Guard not flashy enough for you, Fury?”

Fury holds up his hands. “Don’t look at me.” He nods at Peggy, then Stark. “It was their idea.”

Stark shrugs, says, “Attention-seeker. Dad didn’t hug me enough.”

Peggy chimes in, smirking and looking rather pleased with herself, “My first love _is_ the theater.”

“The point of this exercise is to be high-profile,” Fury says.

“Oh, yeah?” Bucky asks him, “Since when did the SSR-- Sorry, SHIELD –- want to draw attention to themselves?”

Fury leans back in his seat and folds his hands in front of his lap. He indulges in a dramatic pause long enough that Bucky wonders whether he's going to answer the question at all. Then, he says, his voice booming and causing Bucky to jump an inch out of his seat, “The world is getting smaller. And one day, sooner than we’d like to think, you and everyone like you won’t be able to hide anymore. It’s important for people to know that you’re on their side.”

Bucky appreciates Fury's honesty, but he has to wonder, “Are we? On their side? All of us?”

Fury takes a deep breath, says, “We’re working on that.”

“And when does _that_ become part of our mission? Some kid starts blasting lasers out of his eyeballs, and we get sent in to take him out?”

“That’s not going to happen,” Peggy says, calm and confident. As if nothing bad could come of displaying one’s freakishness for all the world to see.

“The Avengers are a peacekeeping force,” Fury says. “Save civilians, contain threats. No casualties. I don’t want the U.N. on my ass.”

“’The Avengers?’” Bucky asks.

“Back in the camp, after we broke out of Zola’s lab,” Natasha says, “That’s what they called me and Peggy: avenging angels.”

Bucky chuckles. “Well, we’re certainly not angels.” He looks back over at Fury. “So, who’s in charge of this variety show?” he asks.

“A rotating group of U.N. councilmembers,” Fury says.

Bucky scoffs, “Well, that’s just swell. Because we all know the U.N. is infallible.”

Fury shrugs, “Lucky for you, I’m not in the habit of following stupid orders.”

This is absurd; there are so many ways this could go wrong. But Bucky’s stomach tightens and his palms sweat with what he knows damn well is excitement.

"James," Peggy says, soft. The tone is not one she usually uses. Bucky looks up and across the table at her, and she continues, "I know you’re not one for the spotlight these days. But there are a lot of powerless people in this world that would do anything to have your abilities. You don’t owe anyone anything, but-- Just think about that when you consider what we’re doing.”

Bucky sighs, and decides to use the last token protest he can think of, “You guys really want a one-armed superhero on your team?”

Next to him, Stark grins, shark-like, “I might be able to help you out with that.”

-

“Have you heard of mirror therapy?” Bruce asks from where he’s sticking some sort of flexible metallic disks to Bucky’s stump just above where it ends.

“What the hell is mirror therapy?” Bucky asks, tetchy and trying his damndest not to wig out. The sensor-covered straps that Stark’s got wrapped around his upper body and the top of his head are reminding him too much of his time in the company of Arnim Zola.

Stark, facing them from the other side of a green-glowing computer monitor, doesn’t seem to notice, too busy interpreting whatever readings he’s getting off of the sensors.

At least Bruce seems to understand. He even offered to give Bucky a half dose of one of his special opioids just to take the edge off. Bucky appreciates the thought, but he had to decline; he doesn’t want to go back down that road.

Bruce explains, his voice a deep, soothing rumble that Bucky tries to concentrate on, “Neuroscientists are currently theorizing that phantom limb pain is caused by the lack of sensory input from the missing limb and the subsequent reorganization in the somatosensory cortex--”

“English, please, doc,” Bucky says, smiling warmly so as not to cause offense. Bruce is one of the nicest guys on the planet. Besides, Bucky would much rather yell at Tony right now.

“Oh, uh--” Bruce ducks his head, clears his throat, and continues, “They used to think phantom limb pain was caused by damaged nerves. Turns out your brain is just confused because it still thinks your arm is there and can’t understand why it’s not moving and doesn’t feel anything.” He points repeatedly at Bucky’s stump with the tape measure he’s holding, his voice rising in pitch as he explains, “But if you put a mirror between your present and your missing limb and look into it, it tricks your brain into thinking the missing limb is still there. It assists patients in doing exercises that involve both arms, which alleviates phantom limb pain.”

“No shit?” Bucky asks, momentarily forgetting his irritation.

Bruce looks up at him from underneath his eyebrows and smiles. “No shit.”

“This will accomplish the same thing,” Tony butts in, standing in front of them now. He’s holding something conical and metallic in both hands, displaying it proudly in front of his chest. “Probably. Maybe.”

“‘Maybe,’” Bucky repeats, his annoyance coming back full force.

“You’ll have to move your left arm to use the-- the--” Bruce searches for the word as he flaps his hand repeatedly at the object Tony’s holding.

“Let’s call it an ‘extension,’” Tony interrupts, rocking forward on the balls of his feet in excitement. “Bruce,” he says, handing him the conical object, “You’re on.” Only then does he step forward to un-velcro the straps around Bucky’s chest and head and drop them to the floor, careless now that he’s done with them.

Bruce holds the metallic cone to the end of Bucky’s stump. The muscles in Bucky’s left shoulder tingle, and then the cone nearly jumps out of Bruce’s hand as it attaches itself to the end of Bucky’s stump.

“What the hell is this thing?” Bucky asks, lifting his stump up to get a better look at it. On closer inspection, it’s actually a cone with its top lopped off. And inside, running through the center of it, is what looks like a copper tube.

Tony, standing in front of him and holding a remote control of some sort, sighs, “Maybe don't look directly into the plasma torch, Barnes.”

“ _Plasma_?” Bucky asks, incredulous.

As if agreeing with Bucky’s sentiment, Bruce quickly moves away from the object he’s just attached to Bucky’s stump to stand by Tony’s side.

Tony is grinning excitedly at Bucky, drumming his fingers on the back of the remote. “Now,” he says, “Extend your left arm out to the side. Your left hand too, palm out. As quickly as you can.”

Bucky looks at Bruce for confirmation, and Bruce smiles and nods, although he seems just as affected by excitement as Tony. “Do it with both arms, if that’s easier,” he suggests.

Bucky takes a deep breath, closes his eyes to concentrate, and does as he’s asked. He sits up straight and whips both arms out to the side of his body. His left arm moves much slower than his right, but he’s surprised by how quickly his body accepts the existence of it.

As soon as it’s fully extended, a high-pitched squeal fills the room, and then stops abruptly. Bucky looks to his left to see a flickering arc of blue lightning jumping almost a foot off the end of his stump. It gives off intermittent, electronic chirps and a sweet, plasticky smell like canned air.

“What the fuck?” Bucky says.

“It’s a plasma arc, held in place by a magnetic field,” Bruce explains. “Useful on missions, especially in hand-to-hand combat scenarios if someone has you pinned down--”

“Or in case I feel like lighting myself on fire?” Bucky asks.

“Impossible,” Tony says. “Those magnetic sensors that are holding it in place will also shut it off if it gets anywhere close to your body.”

“You sure about that?” Bucky asks.

“Positive,” Tony says, but he grips the remote control in his hands a little tighter.

“Alright,” Bucky says. “Here goes nothing.” He moves his left arm slowly across his body, and at the point where his bicep would touch his chest, the extension shuts off and the plasma disappears.

He tries it again to be sure, throwing his left arm out, this time almost parallel to his body. The plasma arc jumps out of the extension, and then disappears when it gets too close to his torso.

Some long dormant part of his brain sparks and comes to life as he moves his left arm in ways that he hasn’t in decades. He bends his elbow and the arc shortens. He can’t quite move his fingers, but if he waves his hand, the arc moves with it.

Incredibly, the ache in his left arm that’s been present since the day it was taken from him, dissipates, ever so slightly. Bucky takes a breath so deep that it makes his lungs hitch; his eyes are wet.

“So, what do you think?” Tony asks him, thankfully oblivious to Bucky’s emotional state. “Pretty _swell_ , huh?”

“Shut up, Stark,” Bucky says, but he’s grinning.

-

**The West Village, New York - September, 1981**

“J, what the fuck are you wearing?” Hollywood James -- called so to differentiate him from Bucky -- asks him.

Bucky looks down at his Star Wars t-shirt, soaked in sweat from the past hour he’s spent on the dance floor. “What do you got against Star Wars? It’s a great movie.”

James scrunches his eyes shut and says, pained, “Ugh, why are you such a breeder.”

Bucky laughs as he slides a hand into his jeans pocket to grab some cash and pay the bartender. “Tell that to Dominic,” he says, picking up his beer and taking a gulp.

James’ eyes widen. “You didn’t,” he says.

“I did,” Bucky says, smirking.

James throws his head back and cackles, delighted. He’s knows that Bucky doesn’t get laid that often. Bucky’s not comfortable having a lot of partners, and frankly, not a lot of guys at these clubs are lining up to sleep with an amputee.

“Oh my god, tell me everything. Is he cut? Please tell me he isn’t cut please, J, I want to believe.”

Bucky starts laughing in anticipation of what he know is going to be a really good alkyl nitrite-fueled comedic monologue-- when James’ eyes roll back in his head and he drops. One hundred and forty pounds of dead weight hitting the floor of the club head-first.

Bucky rushes him to the emergency room. But aside from a mild concussion and the three staples they have to put in his scalp, he’s fine.

A couple months later, their mutual friend Luis doesn’t show up to his DJ set at the Saint. Bucky gets a call from Manny a couple days later; Luis is in a coma and has been for almost two weeks. He and and his partner Adam were having their morning coffee when Luis fell to the floor of their apartment, seizing. He still hasn’t woken up.

Something’s going around the Village.

It even gets a column in the Times. They refer to it as a “gay cancer” that’s affecting its victims’ immune systems. Bucky doesn’t know what the hell being gay has to do with getting cancer. But he does wonder if that many people can inhale that many chemicals that often without it adversely affecting their health.

Thank god for small mercies, Bucky thinks -- at least cancer isn’t contagious.

-

“Be careful,” Becca tells him one afternoon after their weekly lunch at Tom’s Restaurant.

She’s working as a nurse over at Kings County, started going to night school after she finally divorced her cheating rat bastard of a husband in ‘71.

Her boys, Grant and Michael, are grown men now. And Becca’s a grandma twice over - Grant and his wife just had their second kid.

“You know me, Bec,” Bucky says, blowing smoke out of the corner of his mouth and away from her. “I’m like a bad penny. Besides, you should see this armor Stark’s got me wearing--”

“You heard about this ‘cancer’ that’s going around the Village?”

Bucky freezes. “What?”

Becca doesn’t miss a beat, turns around to face him, and keeps talking. “They think it might be sexually transmitted.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

Becca lets an impatient breath out through her nose. “The other day, the Avengers were on the news in one of my patient’s rooms. He said he’d seen you at one of the clubs in the Village. Said you were even more gorgeous in real life than you were on tv.”

Bucky’s silent, not knowing what to say. He can deal with disgust from a lot of people, but not Becca.

“Looking back, it made sense,” she goes on. “You’ve never been married or had a serious girlfriend. And then I thought about how close you and Ste--” She stops abruptly, her mouth open but no sound coming out. She glances up at him, expression contrite. “Shit, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t assume--”

“No, you’re right,” Bucky says.

A shadow passes over her face then, and it reminds Bucky of the deep sorrow that filled her eyes on the day he’d told her that Steve had been killed. Hurting with Bucky’s pain, reflecting it back to him.

Then, she clears her throat and says, “Well, like I said, be careful. Use a rubber or whatever.”

“Jesus, Bec,” Bucky says, grimacing. Regardless of what gender he’s sleeping with, the last person he wants to talk about his sex life with is his sister.

Becca laughs, steps forward to link her arm with his and continue them on their walk.

-

**1988**

Every time Bucky comes back from a mission covered in bruises, he watches them closely, praying they’ll all fade, praying that none of them will stick around and prove to be something worse.

There’s no cure. There’s not even a treatment.

It’s been seven years.

Several New York hospitals have made it their unofficial policy not to treat AIDS patients. People on the brink of death are forcibly removed from emergency rooms by security guards.

It doesn’t matter that everyone now knows HIV is sexually transmitted; the only available test for it has proven to be wildly inaccurate, so no one really knows who has it until they get sick. It strikes fast and without warning, swooping down out of the air to snatch people away.

Bucky’s on his way to an Avengers meeting one day when he’s stopped in his tracks by a flyer taped to the hallway wall. It reads:

 ** _SILENCE = DEATH_**  
  
_We will no longer be silent._  
  
_ACT UP_  
_(AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power)_  
  
_Next meeting: Tuesday, August 16th at 8:00 PM_  
_496A Hudson Street, Suite G4, New York, NY_  
  
**_Act up! Fight back! Fight AIDS!_**

Bucky tears the flyer off the wall, folds it, and stuffs it into his back pocket.

A couple weeks later, he walks into a loft space just off of Christopher Street and is nearly knocked backward by the sight and sound of nearly two hundred people crowded into the space. Their voices echo off the high walls, an energy and excitement filling the air like a theater just before a performance.

Several people catch sight of Bucky and fix him with icy stares. They know exactly what kind of hypocrite he is. They’ve seen him dancing and making time with men around the Village, and they’ve seen him on tv working as hired muscle for a government that’s killing those same men.

“About time you showed up,” says a voice to his left.

Bucky turns to see a (very good-looking) young, black man staring at him with a hard expression, his arms crossed over his chest.

Bucky itches with the uncanny feeling that he’s seen this guy somewhere before.

“Sam Wilson,” he remembers aloud. The boy SHIELD discovered ten years ago in Harlem talking to birds. He’s all grown up now.

Bucky’s never met him but he’s seen pictures and read his stats. He’s been part of the Avengers recruitment and training program for the past couple of years.

“What are you doing here?” Bucky asks him.

Wilson arches an eyebrow at him. “What does it look like I’m doing?”

Bucky still sometimes forgets that there are gay people everywhere, not just in the Village. “Right,” he says, nodding. “Sorry.”

Wilson keeps his arms crossed, but he lets out a small sigh and deflates a bit. “You lose someone?”

Bucky snorts. “I’ve lost damn near everyone.” Hollywood James, Luis, Adam, Dennis, Calvin, Sheila, Daniel, Danny, Loud Mary, Eugene-- “Every day someone’s diagnosed or dies, and no one cares. Koch doesn’t care. Reagan sure as hell doesn’t care. And every week I’m on the other side of the world doing his dirty work for him.”

Wilson nods, understanding. “Makes you consider quitting, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah, but then I’d just be letting down my other friends,” Bucky says.

“I feel that,” Wilson says and drops his arms. “Well, doing something is better than doing nothing.” He tips his head towards the crowd behind him. “C’mon, I’ll introduce you to everyone.”

-

**1991**

Bucky’s kept his apartment in Baltimore all these years in case he decided to move back, to be closer to the Triskelion and work. But with the speed and affordability of plane travel these days, there’s really no need to.

He’s helping one of the movers pick up his record cabinet when something that’s been lodged behind it comes loose and thunks to the floor. Bucky cranes his head to see one of his Bronze Stars with “V” Device. He laughs. It’s probably been there for decades; and who knows how the hell it got there in the first place. The 60s were a crazy time.

He takes it to Green-Wood the next time he goes, takes a little spade so he can bury it next to Steve’s headstone -- where he’s put every medal they’ve ever given him, where they belong.

He chats with Steve as he digs, “You’d be real proud of me; I’ve been causing a ruckus lately. Got myself arrested and everything.” He grins when he imagines Steve clenching his jaw and letting an angry breath out through his nostrils. _I don’t know that being arrested is something to be proud of, Buck,_ he imagines Steve saying, the hypocrite.

“God, I love you,” Bucky says, and then he freezes, suddenly twenty again and scared of how much his best friend means to him.

But he’s not twenty anymore, he’s an old man, telling Steve how he feels about him fifty years too late.

Bucky gulps down a deep breath, tilts his head back, and lets it out towards the sky. “Shit, Stevie,” he says. “I’m so sorry.”

-

**A bus en route from Kandahar to Quetta - September, 1991**

Blending in isn’t his biggest problem. Despite his size and the Western flatness to his features, he doesn’t look all that different from the Pashtun; there are plenty of them with blue eyes, freckles, pale skin, and pale hair. As long as he keeps his beard grown out and his clothing loose, he doesn’t draw too much attention.

The real trouble is that he’s become a burden to the village. Regardless of all the work he does, there’s only so much food to go around among an increasingly impoverished people. And he eats more than most.

He can’t go north; he doesn’t speak any Turkic languages. And the Tajiks are on the brink of civil war.

He can’t go west; Iran isn’t safe for a Russian _or_ an American.

So he’s heading east to Pakistan; it’s as neutral a country as he can get to right now with his limited resources, and he can already speak the language in Quetta. Maybe he can get himself a labor job, work himself like a dog until his body can’t do anything but sleep. Maybe time and distance will help him forget and be forgotten.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which a ghost makes an appearance.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Coming to you courtesy of the two feet of snow that just got dumped on New England. And the fact that I had to take a break from writing angry letters to government officials. :]
> 
> If you're still reading and enjoying, drop me a comment. I'd love to hear from you guys. <3

" _I ran_  
 _my neck broken I ran_  
 _holding my head up with both hands I ran_  
 _thinking the flames_  
 _the flames may burn the oboe_  
 _but listen buddy boy they can't touch the notes!_ "

\- "The Dead Shall Be Raised Incorruptible” by Galway Kinnell

 

**41st Floor of The Triskelion, Washington, D.C. - December, 1999**

Between the Triskelion’s circular structure and its endless glass hallways, it might as well be a damn mirror maze. Bucky gets there a full fifteen minutes before the meeting starts, and sure enough, he’s seven minutes late.

He turns a corner and spots the rest of the Avengers through the glass wall of a conference room to his right. Clint - staring at the ceiling and spinning in his chair - sees Bucky, throws his arms in the air, and cheers. Tony, Sam, Luke, Miles, and Carol all follow his line of sight and do likewise.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Bucky mutters as he walks into the room and takes the open seat next to Sam.

Director Hill looks up from where she’s leaning over her laptop. “Alright. Meeting in session. Barnes, good of you to join us,” she says brusquely, not looking at him.

Bucky opens his mouth to make a smart remark, but Hill is smart enough to act first before he can get a word in.

She presses a button on her laptop and a grainy photograph pops up on the screen at the front of the room. It looks to be a detail of a larger photograph, and going by the officers' uniforms and the presence of Marshall Zakharov, it was taken sometime in the early 60s.

Standing in front of Zakharov is a young Russian officer, a Captain by the looks of the epaulets and the medals on his otherwise modest dress uniform. Zakharov shakes his hand and smiles up at him - the guy must be at least six feet tall - and the Captain offers Zakharov a warm but reserved smile in return. The brim of his hat obstructs most of his face aside from his mouth and chin, but Bucky can at least tell that he’s fair-haired and very fair-skinned.

On his right arm, he holds an unusually ostentatious accessory for a Russian officer: a shield on which is embossed the Russian coat of arms.

“Obviously, Marshall Zakharov is no longer with us,” Hill says, “But the man on the left very much is. And he’s been putting the scientific community through hell for the past five years. Our mission is to bring him in alive. And I do want to stress the word ‘alive.’

“His name is Alexi Shostakov,” she goes on. “Former GRU agent and Captain in the Soviet Army as well as something of a poster boy.” She presses a button on her laptop to turn to the next slide and up pops a Soviet Army propaganda poster. In the center is a highly-stylized portrait of Captain Shostakov, looking every bit the Slavic hero with his shoulders back, his shield in front of his chest, and his head turned just so.

Behind him are rows of cannons and the old hammer and sickle flag. At the bottom of the poster in bold, red Cyrillic are the words “слава советской армии!” (“Glory to the Soviet Army!”)

“He defected in 1964,” Hills continues, “That same year, he was recruited by the CIA. He worked for them as a counterintelligence agent for twenty-five years.

“His latest posting was in Afghanistan from 1983 to 1989, training and fighting alongside the mujahideen. After the Soviets withdrew and the war ended, he went AWOL. Never made it back to the States.

“In ‘93, he started popping up in Russia, sabotaging the work of various professors, doctors, and scientists.”

Carol asks, “When you say ‘sabotage,’ you mean--”

“I mean breaking into their homes and their places of work and destroying their research,” Hill stands up straight, folds her arms in front of her chest. “All paper and digital traces, gone. He obviously can’t disappear any work that’s too well-known or widely-published, so in those cases, he simply targets his victim’s latest project.”

“If the victims are Russian, then why do we care?” asks Clint.

“Because in ‘95 he left Russia and came here,” Hill says.

“How many victims are we talking?” Bucky asks.

“Seventeen in total. Russian and American. To date, he’s destroyed almost a hundred and fifty years worth of scientific research.”

“Shit,” Tony exhales, sounding almost scared.

“He ever killed anyone?” Sam asks.

Hill shakes her head. “Never laid a finger on any of them. None of his victims have ever caught him in the act and no witnesses have ever seen anything more than a shadow.”

“And why hasn’t the CIA been able to catch him?” Tony asks, derision in his voice.

“Because he’s faster, stronger, and smarter than all the agents that have been sent after him combined.”

Bucky sits forward in his chair, points at the screen at the front of the room. “In that first photograph you showed us, the one taken sometime in the early 60s, Shostokov was, what? In his twenties? So today, he’d be in his mid-sixties.”

“Actually, the CIA’s best guess is that he’s somewhere in his mid-seventies. Just a little bit younger than you, Barnes.”

Bucky falls back in his seat. “He’s enhanced.”

“We think so,” Hill says.

Memories that Bucky thought he’d long ago compartmentalized begin to unfurl and awaken, and with them, an old fear. “Was he one of Zola’s?” he asks Hill.

Hill shakes her head. “A Russian scientist named Vasily Karpov created his own version of Zola’s serum, likely as a result of Soviet collaboration with German scientists during Operation Osoaviakhim. Zola’s research must have been passed on somehow since, as you know, Zola committed suicide in 1945.”

“Are there others like him?” Bucky asks.

“Mission first, Barnes,” Hill says, “You can tinhat on your own time.” She leans over her laptop to bring up a map of downtown Montreal. “Shostokov’s next target is the office of Dr. William Stryker, a tenured professor in the Faculty of Medicine at McGill University. We think he’s going to strike over the winter holidays while the school is closed and the campus is mostly empty.”

“Most polite super villain ever,” Miles murmurs.

At the mention of McGill, Bucky fidgets in his chair. He’s pretty sure his grand niece, Zinnia, goes to school there. He’s going to have to call Becca.

-

As soon as he gets back to New York, Bucky calls her from a payphone - he suspects his new cellular phone is no more secure than his old rotary one.

He hears the click of someone picking up the receiver, and then a voice that is definitely not Becca’s says, “Hello?”

“Grant?” Bucky says, too loud and overly-excited. “It’s Uncle Bucky. How you doing, kid?  I didn’t realize you were in town. You visiting your mom for the weekend?”

“Uh,” Grant says, “Sorry, who is this?”

Bucky frowns. “It’s your un-” He stops when something occurs to him: today is Christmas Eve. Becca’s whole brood must all be at her house for the holidays.

“Sailor? Is that you?” Bucky asks. “You sound just like your dad.”

“Uh, yeah,” Sailor says. “Do you wanna talk to him?”

Bucky pulls the receiver away from his mouth so that he doesn’t sigh right into it. He always forgets that he and Becca have had 'the talk' with Grant and Michael but not with their kids. Sailor doesn’t know that he and Bucky are related.

“No… no, that’s okay,” Bucky tells him. “You probably don’t remember me, but we met when you were a kid.” Dead silence on the other end of the line, and Bucky stumbles over his words. “I’m, uh… I’m an old friend of your grandma’s. Is she there? Can I talk to her?”

Bucky feels it when Sailor drops the receiver on the table and yells, “Grandma! Phone for you!”

Bucky hears his sister’s voice in the background, and then Sailor’s voice saying to her, “I think he said his name was Bucky?”

It takes a couple minutes for Becca to get to the phone. She just had knee replacement surgery a couple months ago.

“It’s strange, isn’t it?” Becca says as soon as she picks up the phone, as if she and Bucky are already in the middle of a conversation. “Kid’s old enough to vote now.”

“Don’t remind me,” Grant grumbles in the background.

Bucky chuckles. “You guys having a good time?”

“Oh, I’m having a great time. Every time I stand up, Michael’s wife pushes me back into my chair and forces me to put my knee up. So aside from providing lodging, I’m not doing a damn thing. Just like my good-for-nothing sons.”

Bucky hears both Michael and Grant protest loudly in the background.

“I’m making dessert,” one of the voices says. Bucky thinks it’s Michael’s.

“Only because you won’t eat my pumpkin pie.” Becca says, and then to Bucky, loud so Michael can hear it too, “Michael’s on a diet where he can’t eat bread. Have you ever heard of such a thing?”

“You know, Bec, you’re lucky your kids inherited your sense of humor. Otherwise, they’d be billing you for their therapy sessions.”

Becca sighs, “Don’t I know it.”

“And the grandkids? How they doing?” Bucky asks, smoothly transitioning into the reason he called. “They all there too?”

“They’re here too,” Becca says, voice soft and fond. “Zinnia’s on break from college until after the new year. And you should see the twins, Buck. They inherited our good looks.”

“Oh, yeah? They look like you, then?”

“Actually, I think they look like you,” Becca says.

Bucky grins dumbly into the receiver.

“So you wanna join us for Chinese takeout tonight?” Becca asks. “You’re welcome to come over on Christmas morning too if you don’t have any other plans.”

Bucky would love to. But despite Becca’s insistence to the contrary, Bucky knows that Grant and Michael haven’t been comfortable around him since they found out what he is.

The last time he talked to them - at Michael’s wedding ten years ago - was filled with awkward silences. Most people aren't equipped to make small talk with someone that served in World War II and doesn’t look a day over thirty.

And it would be both difficult and dangerous to explain to Sailor and Zinnia what Bucky is, especially since he mostly works covertly these days. The Avengers have declined in popularity over the years, as the anti-war movement has aged into respectability and political clout. They don’t even show the old Avengers cartoon on reruns anymore.

“Thanks, Bec, but I gotta work,” Bucky says, trying to sound disgruntled.

“You’re always working,” Becca says. “You need to settle down, get yourself a steady fella.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Bucky says, brushing aside the familiar line of questioning.

Bucky hears a sudden, metallic crash in the background. Becca sighs, “That’s Michael trying to make his dessert. I gotta go before he burns the whole block down.”

Bucky chuckles. “Tell him and Grant I said ‘hi,’ alright?”

“I will. Me and you oughtta get lunch soon. Sometime when you’re not working.” Becca teases.

“Of course,” Bucky says. And then, after a pause. “Love you, sis. Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas, Buck.”

-

Bucky leaves the walkman on his seat so that he can put on his body armor without the wires getting in the way.

He turns the volume up loud enough that he can still hear the music. Out of the headphones booms a hard beat and the words:

 _“If I wasn't in the rap game_ _  
_ _I'd probably have a key knee-deep in the crack game_ _  
_ _Because the streets is a short stop_ _  
_ _Either you're slinging crack rock or you got a wicked jump shot.”_

From the captain’s seat of the Quinjet, Tony swivels his head around. “Barnes,” he says slow and rising in pitch, “what are we listening to?”

“This is Notorious B.I.G.” Bucky says, grinning, sliding his tac vest on over his head. “He’s from Brooklyn.”

Tony rolls his eyes. “I know who it is. I’m just surprised you do.”

“Tell me, Stark,” Bucky says, sitting down in front of Natasha so she can weave his hair into a tight braid, “do you think your generation _invented_ curse words?”

“I just figured you’d be more into-- I dunno, ragtime or whatever.”

“You realize Scott Joplin died before I was born, right?”

“Syphilis,” Clint grumbles where he’s lying supine across three seats, hungover. At least he’s making himself useful by loading up Bucky’s moon clips for him. “Damn shame.”

Carol, standing to Bucky’s left and pulling on a dark blue stealth version of her uniform, says, “Are you saying that Scott Joplin died of syphilis? Or are you just expressing your general distaste for it?”

“Who’s Scott Joplin?” Miles pipes up.

“You need to learn your history, son,” Luke says.

“Why should I care about some dead white dude?”

Clint and Bucky snort out a laugh at the same time. Luke’s head drops down to his chest as he sighs in disappointment.

They’re cleared to land in Parc du Mont Royal, a park adjacent to the campus. Tony touches the Quinjet down in a clearing where it lands with a quiet hiss. As the engine goes silent, everyone turns to look at Carol.

She doesn’t acknowledge them, eyes unfocused and mind somewhere in the near future as she slicks back her short hair. After a silent minute, her hands freeze and her eyes track to the side slowly, until they land on Bucky.

The back of Bucky’s neck tingles. “What?”

Carol blinks back to the present, looks around at everyone in the cabin. She smiles, oblivious to the eerie look she just gave Bucky. “We’re good,” she says. “No disturbance in the Force.”

Everyone in the cabin exhales at once, the tension abruptly vanishing. The mission would have been doomed from the start had Shostokov heard them coming a mile away and fled.

Tony flips a switch on the Quinjet’s control panel to open the runway before kicking back in his seat. “Alright, everybody out of the bus. Have fun. Don’t forget to take your lunches with you.” Tony brought the suit with him in case he needs it, but -- seeing as he’s about as stealth as an eighteen wheeler -- he’s sitting this op out.

Bucky and Nat are taking point with Clint and Carol flanking. Luke is guarding the rear, Miles is on the roof, and Sam is in the sky.

Shostokov’s most likely location is the Strathcona Building, an imposing gray stone monolith where the Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology is housed.

Inside, the ceilings are high and arched, and the shiny marble floors and walls amplify the squeak of Bucky’s boots when he accidentally brings his foot down too quickly. The instant he does, a sound that Bucky didn’t even realize he was hearing stops abruptly: a slow tapping, like someone hen-pecking a keyboard.

Bucky slides his Glock into his chest holster, and Natasha moves in close to his right shoulder so she can cover him while he signs to her. He lifts his fist up beside his head, _Stop_ , then cups his hand behind his ear, _Listen_.

They wait. Seconds stretch into a minute, then two. Then, the tapping starts up again. It’s coming from behind the wall at their backs - the location of Stryker’s office.

Bucky takes his Glock back out of its holster, takes a deep breath, and continues forward.

Once he reaches Stryker’s office door, he waves Nat forward so she can quickly twist the knob and push it open before stepping back.

When they’re not met with answering enemy fire, Bucky steps forward into the doorway, sidearm leveled.

Standing beside Stryker’s desk, rifle shouldered, is Steve.

Everything in Bucky’s peripheral vision blurs, like a camera rapidly pulling focus, his depth of field shrinking. He blinks, then blinks again.

Steve goes still, and his lips part in shock. He lowers his rifle. “Bucky?” he says, and the high-pitched break in his voice is a slug to Bucky’s chest.

Bucky wobbles on his feet, lowers his gun.

Steve’s about a foot too tall, and his obviously bulky form is swamped by a grimey poncho and Desert BDU trousers. His head is shaved and his parted lips are framed by an unkempt beard that he shouldn’t be able to grow. But it’s him.

He’s staring at Bucky with that dumb, slack-jawed look on his face that Bucky hadn’t even realized he remembered. The corners of his eyes droop down with his frown and his eyebrows pinch together, a crease forming just above the little bump on the bridge of his nose.

“Steve?” Bucky near-whispers, afraid to speak to the illusion and dispel it.

Steve nods, and then he says, voice phlegmy from disuse, “I thought you were dead.”

Bucky laughs, because _that’s_ funny. That’s fucking hilarious.

Bucky feels Natasha slide into a covering position behind him and the weight of her pistol over his left shoulder.

Steve’s nostrils flare and he shoulders his rifle again, aiming it just to Bucky’s right. His gaze flits back and forth between Bucky and Nat. “Please,” he says, “don’t make me do this.”

“No one’s making you do anything, Captain,” Natasha says in her calm, de-escalation voice. “You kill us, that’s all on you.”

It’s exactly the right thing to say to someone like Steve, who never met a responsibility he didn’t like.

The muscles in Steve’s jaw clench, and he readjusts his grip on his rifle. He doesn’t bring it down, but he also doesn’t put his finger on the trigger.

Natasha speaks again, “Barnes might hesitate to kill you. But I won’t. Drop your weapon now.”

Something occurs to Bucky then, and he says, his voice sounding far away and echo-y to his own ears, “Steve, run. We have orders not to kill you. Run.”

Steve stares at Bucky for a moment, and then he turns and bolts out the office’s side door, leaving Bucky with only an afterimage of the shield strapped across his back.

“Shit,” Natasha spits and takes off after him.

Bucky spins and books it out of Stryker’s office and down the hall, toward the southwest stairwell where Clint should be coming up.

In his ear he hears Natasha pant, “Target is on the move, coming down the northwest stairwell. Barton, Carol, get to the ground floor now.”

Bucky bursts in through the exit door just as Clint is turning to run down the stairs. He lets inertia propel him forward, gets a foot on the stairway railing and jumps across the three storey fall to land on his feet at Clint’s back.

Clint turns with his sidearm drawn, and Bucky smacks him on the side of the head, aiming for surprise over injury.

Clint stumbles, frowning at Bucky like he’s hurt his feelings.

Bucky takes advantage of his momentary shock to shove Clint up against the railing with his left side. He grabs a zip tie out of his utility belt and straps one of Clint’s wrists then the other to the railing.

He’ll be able to break out of them after a few minutes of pulling. But that buys Steve time to get out of the building and away.

“Barnes, what the fuck?” Clint spits.

“Sorry, man,” Bucky says. “I’ll explain later. After you get out, go help Nat.” And then he’s rushing down the stairs, Clint screaming after him.

Over the comm he hears a thump and a grunt as Natasha collides with an opponent. The thud of fists hitting flesh and the rasp of fabric as they grapple.

He gets to the ground floor just as Carol is exiting the southeast stairwell, opposite him.

He keeps running across the lobby, slams into her and sends her flying back through the doorway.

In his ear, he hears Nat panting “Target exiting the northwest stairwell at the ground floor in approximately ten seconds. Barton, Carol get there. Barnes is compromised. I repeat: Barnes is compromised.”

Carol’s eyes widen, and without hesitation, she raises her hands toward Bucky. The hair on his arms and legs stand up as the air around him charges.

He throws the stairwell door shut, extends his left arm, and slashes the plasma arc through the the hardware. The door latch melts into the strike plate, locking Carol in the stairwell just as she throws the first energy blast

Like Clint, she’ll be able to get out sooner than later, so Bucky needs to hurry.

He turns, and Steve is standing in the middle of the lobby, staring at him. His eyes take Bucky in, from his head to his toes, and Bucky does the same to him, making sure he’s real, that he’ll be there between one blink and the next.

Behind Bucky, the stairwell door rattles on its hinges under the force of Carol’s energy blasts.

Bucky nods toward one of the windows that line the rear of the building. “Go out the window,” he tells Steve. “Luke is at the back door, but you can outrun him. Once you’ve hit the treeline, head any direction but north. That’s where our jet is.”

Steve stares into his eyes, licks his lips as if he’s getting ready to say something, and then just nods, says, “Thanks.”

He turns to run toward the bank of windows, and then stops at the last second, turns back around and says, looking down in thought, “You remember that place we went dancing sometimes? It wasn’t a club-- It was like a theater, but it had a big dance floor. And a stage at one end--”

“The Arcadia,” Bucky chokes out around whatever emotion is lodged in his throat. He tries to clear it before he continues. “It was over in Bed-Stuy.” He laughs, watery. “We didn’t go there a lot ‘cause they didn’t serve booze.”

Steve is looking at Bucky with soft eyes, as if beholding something delicate. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, that was it. You remember that?”

Bucky could live a thousand years and not forgot. “Of course I remember, Stevie.”

Steve’s mouth twists in a small smile. “Good,” he says simply, and then he turns and sprints toward the windows. He grabs his shield and holds it in front of his face and chest as he launches himself through the glass, a human battering ram. He lands on the lawn, rolls, and is on his feet and sprinting toward the park and its cover of trees.

Bucky watches as Luke registers what’s just happened and takes off after him. Luke won’t be able to catch Steve, but if Sam can’t either he’s going to call Tony off the bench.

Bucky takes off out the back door and heads north, towards the Quinjet. He’s still about a quarter a mile away when he hears Sam hiss, “Shit.” There’s a couple seconds of static over the comm, and then Sam is saying, “Tony, I’m grounded.”

“Sam,” Bucky says, nearly freezing in fear.

“I’m fine,” Sam assures him. “But he took out my wings. Tony-”

“I’m on it,” Bucky hears Tony say over the comm, just as the Quinjet comes into view.

Bucky cranks his legs into a higher gear and reaches the end of the ramp just as Tony is running down it, about to shove his helmet onto his head.

“Barnes?” Tony says, slowing his pace.

Bucky has to avoid Tony’s eyes as he throws his left arm out and cuts the plasma arc clean through the arc reactor powering Tony’s suit.

Tony stumbles backwards, face twisted in hurt and confusion as the reactor spits and hisses.

When Natasha’s voice comes over the comm, “Has anyone seen Barnes?” Tony snaps out of it, pulls the gauntlet off of his right hand, and punches Bucky across the face.

-

**Brooklyn - December, 1937**

Steve was sick, sicker than usual, and Bucky was exhausted. When he wasn’t lying awake at night listening to Steve breathe, he was at the Domino factory, working twelve-hour shifts.

His pa’s old war buddy worked up in the office and had put a good word in with the boss. Bucky was in the office every morning, learning the ropes of shipping and logistics, and then doing his eight hour shift on the floor.

On top of that, he was up at dawn every other day shoveling a path through the snow out to the street. By the first of December, the snow banks were up to his waist. Compacted layers melted and re-froze on the sidewalks, turning to thick sheets of ice.

Bucky had nightmares about Steve slipping, falling, and cracking his skull open.

Sarah Rogers had passed the year before, but Steve was still holding tight to his grief, afraid to dishonor her by letting it go.

It was starting to affect his health. A case of strep had laid him out for a week in November before morphing into a persistant cough that left his back aching and spasming. For days he would seem fine, like maybe he was finally out of the woods. And then the temperature would dip down below freezing and it would come roaring back, the cough exhausting him to the point that he could barely get out of bed.

Being sick and stuck in their apartment for days at a time stoked Steve’s temper the way nothing else did. Between that and Bucky’s exhaustion, the mood in their apartment was tense. They argued over every little thing, at each other’s throats like a couple of caged animals.

One night, the week before Christmas, Steve collapsed during his shift at the automat. Bucky, waiting in the dining room for Steve to finish up so they could walk home together, heard the commotion and burst into the kitchen. Ignoring Steve’s coworkers and their frantic questions, he gathered Steve up into his arms and ran the eighteen blocks to Brooklyn Hospital.

“M’fine, Buck. Jus’ forgot to eat. Thas all,” Steve mumbled against his chest as Bucky stumbled through the clinic, surrounded by people hacking and sniffling, all grave threats to Steve’s immune system.

When Bucky finally found a nurse, he shoved Steve into her arms and barked, “Help him.”

Fifty minutes and five cigarettes later, Bucky was pacing the sidewalk outside the hospital when the door opened and he saw the last person he expected to walk out of there on his own steam.

“You ready to go, Buck?” Steve said, upright but still white as a sheet, his words turning to vapor in the cold air. “Or did you wanna cause another scene?”

The cigarette fell out of Bucky’s mouth, and he said simply, “No,” before barging back into the hospital, shouting, “Which one of you saw him? Who let him leave?”

Steve followed after him growling, “Buck, stop.”

At last, Bucky was approached by a doctor who asked him, unimpressed, “Can I help you, young man?”

“Yeah, you can,” Bucky said. He swung his arm around to point behind him at Steve. “Did you help this man?”

The doctor looked over and squinted at Steve from behind his glasses. “What’s your name?”

“Steve Rogers,” Steve said, shoulders hunched and hands shoved into his pockets.

The doctor took a small notebook out of his chest pocket, flipped over the first couple of pages. “Rogers…” he mumbled. “Here we go.” He looked up at Bucky. “Your friend has suffered a mild heart attack.”

Bucky’s own heart jumped in his ribcage, terrified. “Mild?”

“It’s not uncommon with rheumatic heart disease.”

“Ruma- What the hell is that?”

“His heart valves are damaged,” the doctor continued, infuriatingly calm. “Probably due to multiple cases of untreated strep throat over the years.”

Bucky thought he’d known everything on Steve’s list of ailments, but this one was new. He looked over at Steve, but Steve was looking at the floor, shaking his hair out of his eyes.

“So, how do we treat it?” Bucky asked the doctor.

“Aspirin. Three hundred milligrams every four hours over the next two days. Then, drop it down to eighty milligrams. And keep an eye on him; aspirin is a blood thinner and your friend is anemic.”

“And what happens if it goes untreated?”

“Heart failure."

Bucky walked back outside in a daze, Steve following behind him, silent. He stood dumbly on the sidewalk for a moment, and then he spun, threw his fist into a hard-packed snowbank, and shouted, “Goddammit!”

“That’s why I didn’t tell you,” Steve mumbled.

They walked home in silence, some rage-fueled monster trying to claw its way out of Bucky’s chest. Rage at who or what, Bucky couldn’t pinpoint, and so he stayed silent, fuming.

They stopped at the pharmacy to pick up some more aspirin, and after walking Steve to their apartment door and extracting a promise from him that he’d rest, Bucky excused himself to take a walk. The fire in his chest took him all the way to Prospect Park before the tips of his fingers and his toes started to go numb.

He considered stopping somewhere for a drink or three before going back to their apartment. And then he thought of Steve, and the need to get home to him was greater than the need to find what was bothering him at the bottom of a bottle.

When Bucky got back to their apartment, the radio was on and Steve was standing over the sink, scrubbing the dirt off of potatoes with every ounce of strength in his tiny body. Because that was what Steve did at times like these: He got on with things.

Steve’s head jerked around when Bucky shut the door behind him, and Bucky saw that his eyes and the tip of his nose were red.

It was a punch to Bucky’s gut, and he knew then why he was so angry.

Time had been weighing heavy in his mind lately, specifically, Steve’s lack of it. He was aging the way a man not yet twenty years old shouldn’t. Every year he walked up the steps slower, his left shoulder descending as the scoliosis bent his spine sideways.

Bucky thought of Sarah. Maybe all time did was slip away.

Steve sniffed, quickly swiped his wrist under his nose, and started blathering. “This is always how it’s gonna be, Buck. They’re always gonna be finding something else wrong with me. I understand if you don’t want to deal with it. So if you want me to move-”

His words were cut off by Bucky, striding forward and pressing his lips to Steve’s.

As soon as he did, Steve surged up on his toes to meet him like they were in some goddam Hollywood movie, music swelling. Bucky grabbed Steve’s hips with sweaty palms and slid his tongue between Steve’s lips, desperate for him.

A groan rumbled through Steve’s chest and against Bucky’s, making his skin tingle where they were pressed together.

Somewhere in the background, the kitchen faucet was still running.

They both ignored it in favor of grabbing frantically at each other. Bucky palmed Steve’s ass and yanked his hips forward, grinding their cocks together.

When Bucky pulled back for a moment to let Steve get some air, he did so only with his head, keeping up the slow pulse of his hips against Steve’s. He took a deep breath and looked down to see Steve staring up at him, chest heaving as he gulped down air, eyes wide with surprise and clouded with desire.

Bucky needed to know that Steve was sure - purely out of fear and desperation - and he rasped around a block in his throat, “This okay?”

Steve was silent for a moment, and then he leaned his forehead against Bucky’s breastbone and said, lips wet against Bucky’s skin, “Take me to bed, Buck.”

Bucky did the best he could. Leading Steve into his bedroom with his mouth and his hands. Sliding Steve’s suspenders off his shoulders and tipping the buttons on his shirt open with trembling fingers.

He unbuttoned Steve’s slacks and slid them off his ass and down his thighs, then knelt down so that Steve could put one hand on his shoulder while he stepped out of them.

Bucky surged back up to get his hands on Steve again and said against his lips, “You make me dizzy, you know that?”

“Sweet talker,” Steve replied, but Bucky could feel it when he smiled. His hands wrapped around Steve’s ribs, he felt it when the blood rushed to the surface of Steve’s skin. He trailed his thumbs up Steve’s chest to rub at his nipples, tight and pebbled like the gooseflesh on his forearms.

Steve’s hands were at Bucky’s fly, fingertips dipping just below the waistband of his briefs to tickle the hairs there, making Bucky’s cock jump.

The mattress hitting the back of Bucky’s knees surprised him, and he sat before he could fall and take Steve down with him. When his ass hit the mattress, Steve’s cock was right there in front of him, red and curving up toward his belly button, and without thinking twice, Bucky ducked his head to take it into his mouth. He’d never done this, never done more than kiss another person, and he was sloppy and inexperienced.

Steve didn’t seem to mind. He gasped, grabbed at Bucky’s hair, and choked out, “Bucky, I’m gonna-” before spilling into his mouth, not thirty seconds later.

Bucky was on the edge himself, shaking with it. He reached down to pull his cock out of his briefs and stroke himself, but Steve batted his hand out of the way and climbed into Bucky’s lap.

He wrapped long fingers around both their cocks, squeezing and stroking them together, panting into Bucky’s ear. Bucky lasted about as long as Steve had, lust and jealousy knowing that Steve must have learned this from another man driving him out of his mind. He grabbed Steve’s ass where it was grinding against his thighs and bit into Steve’s shoulder to keep from crying out as he came into Steve’s fist.

They were both silent, catching their breath, and then Bucky laughed, couldn’t stop once he started. “Didn’t last long, did we?” he said.

Steve caught the laughter then, a loud, open-mouthed bark that dissolved into a coughing fit.

For weeks they could barely keep their hands off of each other. Kissing until their lips were chapped and Steve face was burned from Bucky’s stubble. Bucky pinning Steve against the wall so they could rut against each other, belts and flies open, underwear still on. Rubbing their cocks together until they came, lips pressed to each other’s skin to keep from saying each other’s names.

Bucky must have ruined a dozen pairs of drawers that winter.

In April, when the snow melted and Steve could breath easier. they went out dancing at the Arcadia. Bucky’s was itching to get back to it, and Steve just wanted out of the house. “I’m sick of looking at you,” he told Bucky, poking him hard in the ribs with a sharp elbow.

Near the end of the night, the band was tearing through “Jumpin’ at the Woodside” and Bucky was laughing and sweating so much that it dripped down his temples and soaked through his undershirt. Near-hysterical with it, he grabbed Steve and pulled him into the middle of the dance floor, picked him up against his chest and spun him in a circle until they were both dizzy.

The girl Bucky had been dancing with laughed; everyone did. It was a big laugh, two fellas dancing together. Even Steve - when Bucky finally put him down - gave him an aggressive, tight-lipped smile and pointedly stepped on Bucky’s feet as Bucky led him through a wobbly Balboa.

At some point the music simmered down, and the trumpet began to croon the first notes of “Fools Rush In.” Steve was still in Bucky’s arms, his mouth still crooked in a small smile before it melted away when the singer took up the first verse:

 _“Fools rush in_  
_Where angels fear to tread_  
_And so I come to you, my love_  
_My heart above my head”_

Steve didn't move away and didn't look away, and Bucky couldn't take his eyes off of him. His lips and cheeks were flushed from exertion. Patches of hair turned dark from sweat peeked out from beneath the blond. His body was burning up in Bucky’s arms, fire against his skin.

Bucky felt Steve step out of his arms and someone else step in, which was impossible since him and Steve were the only people in the room. Even as Steve stumbled backwards away from him, it was just the two of them and the music.

Bucky looked into Steve’s eyes then and he knew.

It was a beginning as fixed and painful as birth, a point from which the rest of his life would be measured.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You’ve never backed down from a fight in your life, Rogers. You’re sure as hell not backing down from this one.”

Bucky is debriefed separately from the rest of the team. The instant he steps off the Quinjet, he’s intercepted by three agents and taken to a room on the Triskelion’s third floor - one of SHIELD’s informal interrogation rooms where non-hostiles and witnesses are brought to be questioned.

There’s a nice view of the Potomac through the bulletproof one-way mirrors that serve as the windows. Opposite the grey-upholstered sofa in which Bucky’s collapsed hangs a giclee print of a lighthouse. A coffee maker and an electric kettle sit in the corner of the room, never used.

When Hill knocks on the door and enters after an indeterminate amount of time, Bucky’s adrift somewhere between the present and a munitions factory in the central Apennines, in a cold, echoing room on the top floor.

He’s watching Steve, strapped to a table and whispering prayers to the ceiling. Eyes wide and white like hunted prey, hands and arms trembling in their restraints.

When Hill sits down in the armchair facing him, Bucky says, “Did you know? That Shostokov was Steve?”

Hill looks momentarily wounded before she blinks her features back into impassivity. She says, “Are you really asking me if an intelligence agency would willingly share intel with another intelligence agency? You’ve worked in D.C. for over fifty years, Barnes. You know better than that.”

“Sorry,” Bucky says, shaking his head at himself. Hill may be a spycraft zealot, but she’d never do something as perverse as knowingly send Bucky on a mission to take down his best friend. “Sorry, I--” he trails off, looks out the window at the wind shaking the bare trees along the G.W. Parkway. It’s supposed to drop down into the twenties tonight. It’ll be even colder up in Montreal. Bucky wonders where Steve is sleeping.

“The CIA’s not going to stop until they catch him, are they?” he says. “Even if they don’t use us to do it.” Bucky thinks of Steve’s matted beard, the skin beneath his eyes weighed down with fear and exhaustion. He won’t have the energy to run for much longer.

“They’ll probably use the SEALs next time,” Hill says. “They won’t send us in after him again.” She pauses, takes a deep breath, and says, “I’ll only ask you this once, but I do have to ask you: Are you sure it was him?”

“Yes,” Bucky says.

Hill nods, satisfied, and then she says, giving him a pointed look, “I wish I could say that I’ll pull some strings and find out what happened to your friend. But I can’t say that.”

Her phrasing is odd, and it takes Bucky a moment to translate it: Bucky is protecting an enemy of the state. Hill can’t _say_  that she’s going to help Bucky, and she can’t be seen to.

Bucky looks up at her, nods, and says. “I understand.”

Hill gives him a small, flat smile and stands up. “Go home,” she says. “You smell like shit. Take a shower, get some sleep. Stop by the pharmacy if you need anything. I’m sure McCoy will sign off on it.”

Bucky huffs out a laugh. “Alright.”

“And once you’ve done that, talk to Natasha,” Hill says, walking towards the door. “I think she’s got something to tell you.”

Bucky frowns. “What’s that?”

Hill turns the knob and pushes the door open with her right shoulder. “It’s not for me to say,” she says before slipping out.

-

Bucky goes back to Brooklyn and - after eating, showering, and sleeping for six hours - spends the next couple of nights walking the blocks surrounding Saratoga Square Park and the construction site across the street from it. Sixty years ago, this is where the Arcadia Dance Hall stood.

It was torn down back in the sixties, but it’s been replaced by a senior housing complex, part of which is currently being renovated. Bucky’s just happy it hasn’t been turned into a godforsaken parking garage. They’ve shouldered their way into the landscape to such an extent that just the sight of them curls Bucky’s mouth into a sneer. Every idiot and their idiot kid’s got a car these days.

Bucky’s walking back east down Macon Avenue on the morning of his third unsuccessful day of searching when he’s hit with the uncanny feeling that he’s being followed. He keeps walking as he glances casually over his shoulder. No one there but local folks and commuters, as far as he can tell.

He walks another three blocks, and the feeling continues to follow him.

He makes a sharp right turn into a nearby alley and waits. After a full minute, he’s about to walk back out when a red-eyed, albino bird comes wobbling in after him.

It’s one of Sam’s homing pigeons.

It pauses a couple of feet in front of Bucky, coos, and rotates to the right so that he can see the note rolled up and holstered to its left leg.

“What the fuck,” Bucky mutters.

The pigeon hoots again and shuffles sideways to get closer, as if trying to charm him.

Bucky takes a deep breath, squats down, and reaches out tentatively for the bird, half expecting it to start pecking at his flesh with its sharp, pink beak.

He snatches the note out of the pigeon’s holster and unrolls it. On it is written a date, time, and GPS coordinates.

Bucky snorts. It’s like the damn intro to Mission: Impossible. He half expects the pigeon to start hissing and dissolve into a cloud of vapor.

He commits the information on the note to memory and is about to pocket it when the pigeon marches towards him, rumbling angrily.

Bucky frowns and searches in his pockets for something to light the note on fire with. But he doesn’t have anything on him. So he crumples it up, tosses it into his mouth, and swallows it.

The pigeon continues to stare at him intently, so Bucky offers it an, “Uh, thank you?”

The pigeon puffs out its chest at that, pleased. And then it turns around, totters back down the alley, and takes wing.

-

At three p.m. the next day, Bucky steps out onto a rooftop in Harlem to the sight, sound, and smell of several dozen homing pigeons socializing in a stilted coop. Holding court in front of them is Sam Wilson, tossing seed through the mesh as he chats with his citizenry.

“Merlin tells me you ate the note,” Sam says without turning around, smiling that big, pretty smile of his. “Sorry about that. He likes to mess with people.”

Bucky arches an eyebrow. “Merlin?”

“Yeah.” Sam says, shrugging. He points at the birds in the coop. “That’s Arthur. That’s Lancelot. That’s Tristram, Gawain, Galahad, Percivale...”

“That one yours too?” Bucky asks, nodding up at the raptor circling far overhead.

Sam puts down the bag of seed, dusts his hands off against each other. “That’s Morgana,” he says, beaming. “She’s our lookout.”

Bucky shakes his head. “You’re a weird guy, Wilson. Anyone ever tell you that?”

Bucky chuckles as he ambles toward Bucky, hands shoved in his jacket pockets. “I grew up talking to birds in Harlem, man. What do you think?”

“Good point,” Bucky says. He looks down at his feet, toes at the gravel on the roof. “I wanted to say I’m sorry for what happened in Montreal. I know my intentions wouldn’t be worth a damn if I’d seriously hurt someone but…” he trails off.

Given the chance to do it all over again knowing who Shostakov really was, Bucky’s not sure he would do anything differently. And he doesn’t know how to apologize for something he’s not entirely sorry for.

Sam crosses his arms in front of his chest and says, “Natasha said he was a friend of yours.”

“More than a friend,” Bucky says, knowing that Sam will understand. If Riley had come back from the dead, Sam would have done the same thing.

A look of surprise and sorrow passes over Sam’s features then, his eyes widening and his lips parting. He unzips his jacket, takes out a folder, and hands it to Bucky.

It’s soft and brown at the edges, old and passed through many hands. There’s nothing on it to indicate what might be inside, except for what’s written on the folder’s tab: Case #UR-67-88349 "Герой”.

Bucky opens up the folder, and staring back at him is a full-page color portrait of Steve in full Soviet officer parade dress, his chin jutting proudly towards the camera and his eyes steely. It’s an old photo, soft-focused like they all were fifty years ago.

Bucky flips quickly through the other documents in the folder; there’s a lot more here than there was in the brief Maria gave them before the McGill op.

“Natasha find this?” Bucky asks Sam.

Sam shakes his head. “I got that from Peggy,” he says. “She said you two have an old friend that works at The Company.”

It takes Bucky a moment to think of who he might know in the CIA, and then he remembers Manny’s little cousin Isabella. He and Peggy both wrote letters of recommendation for her when she applied to West Point back in the late 70’s. Last Bucky heard, she had her own team at the Directorate of Intelligence.

“Peggy,” Bucky says, smiling. He misses her. She retired from the Avengers two years ago, after her girl passed away. Last Bucky heard from her she was in the Caribbean, seeking out distant relatives on her mom’s side. “She back in the States?” Bucky asks Sam.

“Think so. But I wouldn’t go looking for her. She’s still trying to keep a low profile.”

“I figured,” Bucky says. He would imagine she’s still grieving. She and Angie were together for over fifty years. It takes a long time to heal from that kind of loss.

Sam juts his chin out at the folder in Bucky’s hands. “You’ve got twenty-four hours with that. It needs to go back where it came from. Dead drop is the building on west 54th. Apartment number thirty-three. Just slide it under the door.”

Bucky nods, says, “Thanks, Sam. I know this isn’t the safest thing to get involved in, so… Thanks.”

The corner of Sam’s mouth ticks up in a small smile, and he shrugs. “What can I say? I’m a sucker for a good love story.” He considers Bucky with pursed lips for a moment, and then he looks at the folder and asks, “What are you planning on doing with that information?”

Bucky tucks the folder into his jacket, takes a deep breath and lets it out as a sigh. “Something stupid, probably.”

Sam’s smile widens. “I wouldn’t expect anything less.”

-

Bucky was given an honorable discharge in December of ‘43. He spent that Christmas with his family. His little sisters pooled their money together to buy him a nice silk tie that he could wear to his “fancy new job in D.C." Bucky’s ma broke into her hidden stash of scotch after Christmas dinner and she and Bucky stayed up late drinking and chatting. Becca fell asleep on the sofa with her head in Bucky’s lap.

Steve spent that Christmas surrounded by pitch dark and dead silence. No light, no sound, no human touch. For twenty-six days.

Bucky knows the effects of sensory deprivation, he’s read the results of CIA trials. After mere hours, the subject begins to hallucinate. Twenty-four hours or more results in short-term amnesia. Any longer than that and the subject begins to lose all sense of self.

By the time Zola took Steve out of isolation, there were gaping holes in his memory. He could remember what city he was born in but not what country he was in or how he’d gotten there. Zola had to ask him his name four times before he answered correctly.

The first three times he asked, Steve answered, “Bucky,” as if it were the only name he could remember.

He had trouble focusing his eyes, kept screaming in terror at things that weren’t there. His dysphoria was compacted by the fact that he’d shot up a foot and ballooned out to 240 pounds of muscle. And he clung to Zola like a newborn - his first human contact in almost a month.

Zola may have been crazy, but he wasn’t stupid. His research notes suggest that he used the behavior of his staff as a variable in his ongoing experiment on Steve. He trained his doctors, nurses, and administrators to behave erratically or appear incompetent so that his mere presence would have a calming effect on his favorite subject.

By the fall of ‘44, Zola realized that he would never get the army _Übermenschen_ he’d dreamed of. He spent the last six months he had with Steve testing any theory that came to mind.

He sliced Steve’s skin and cut out small chunks of his flesh to see how fast he could heal. He fed and injected him with various poisonous substances, the last of which was an exceedingly high dose of cyanide that he gave to Steve just before he administered it to the rest of his staff, and finally, to himself.

When Soviet soldiers freed Berlin, they found Steve standing calmly at the back of a room filled with dead bodies. He was staring out the open window at the earth three floors below, where flowers were beginning to emerge from the melting snow.

Steve didn’t know his own name, where he’d been born, where he was, or how long he’d been there. He wasn’t a weapon; he wasn’t even an empty one. He was crude iron. They could have made him into anything - a gun, a sewing needle.

Lieutenant Colonel-Podpolkovnik Vasily Karpov made him into a hero.

Steve made for an ideal Russian officer: principled, willful, hot-blooded, and a perfect physical specimen. He served with distinction in Budapest and Czechoslovakia. He honored his country by winning two Olympic silver medals in boxing - one in Helsinki in ‘52 and one in Melbourne in ‘56.

What occurs to Bucky, as sunlight starts to seep cold and blue into his Brooklyn apartment and he thumbs through the last few pages in the folder, is that the names of the American doctors and psychiatrists whose work Steve sabotaged are nowhere to be found in his file.

The Russian scientists are all there: The ones that irradiated him to see if they could make him even bigger, even stronger. The ones that took his blood and the marrow from his bones and injected them into other subjects - both willing and unwilling, all dead. The ones that fed him psilocybin and LSD and methamphetamine, shaving away what little was left of his sanity. The ones that gassed him with nerve agents that made his bowels void and his lungs blister. Just to see what he could take, to see if an army of men like him could walk into a city - say, Prague - filled with sarin gas and survive.

But the names of the American scientists - Donald Ewen Cameron, Harris Isbell, William Stryker - are glaringly absent from the documentation Bucky holds in his hands, no matter how many times he looks through it, hoping to god he’s missed something.

But the thing that really sets off Bucky’s alarms, the thing that makes the hair on his arm and the back of neck stand up is that, contrary to what Hill told them in her briefing, Steve didn’t defect in ‘64. He service record with the Soviets goes all the way into the spring of ‘68, at which point he was captured by the CIA.

  
-

Bucky zips his jacket up to his chin and shoves his hand into the right pocket. From the bench where he’s sitting at the edge of the park, he’s got a perfect view of the housing complex construction site.

Maybe Steve didn’t mention the Arcadia for any particular reason. Maybe Bucky’s just been hanging out with spies too long and is looking for clues where there are none.

The sun has gone down and there’s not a soul in sight save for a young man pacing the sidewalk around the park, muttering to himself. It’s gonna drop below twenty tonight; if Steve’s smart he’s holed up someplace warm.

A figure walks across Halsey and into Bucky’s field of vision. Bucky considers the man for a moment - he’s tall but hunched over, walking with a limp, likely homeless. The only thing he’s got to protect himself from the cold are two hooded sweatshirts layered on top of each other, too-big jeans being held up by a necktie, and a pair of formerly-white sneakers.

Bucky’s about to look away when the man flicks his head to the right twice, as if shaking blond bangs out of his eyes.

Bucky’s up off the bench in an instant, just as Steve vanishes into the scaffolding.

Bucky follows him into the corridor of shadows created by particle board and plastic sheeting. Between one shaft of light and the next, Steve straightens to his full height and his limp disappears. When they enter the steel and wood skeleton of what will soon be the housing complex’s first floor, Steve alights onto a vertical support beam and climbs up into the ceiling, barely breaking pace.

Bucky is slower going, having only the one arm to pull himself up. When he gets there, Steve is balanced on the balls of his feet on one of the ceiling joists, crouching and still as a predator.

“That’s impressive, Stevie,” Bucky pants, smiling, “but I gotta sit down.” He plops down on top of a supporting beam, his back against the top of the wall.

Once he’s situated, he looks up to see Steve staring at his left side, at the empty space where his left arm used to be. “Who did that to you?” Steve asks, his voice thin but echoing in the open space.

“Zola,” Bucky says. “You remember him?”

“Zola,” Steve repeats his eyes moving from side to side as he tries to remember. “The needles?”

The muscles in Bucky’s back twitch, and he clenches his jaw. _I am sorry, Sergeant Barnes. You will have to be awake for this part._

Bucky knows that Steve was injected with some form of the serum. But to have felt that pain with his own body, and to know that Steve endured the same is a torture felt anew.

“Yeah,” Bucky chokes. “Yeah, Stevie, the needles.”

Steve looks up at Bucky from underneath pinched eyebrows. “So, it wasn’t SHIELD?” he asks.

“What?” Bucky rasps. “No. Of course it wasn’t-- Why would you think that?”

Steve doesn’t answer, just stares at him for a long, silent moment, considering. Once he’s looked his fill and is satisfied by whatever he sees in Bucky’s face, he turns away.

He stares out through the ceiling struts to a circle of pavement outside illuminated by a street lamp, says, “They’re gonna come after me again. You shouldn’t be around when they do.”

Bucky bristles at that. “Oh, yeah? And where should I go? Where the hell else should I be if not with you?”

Steve clenches his jaw, still doesn’t look at him. “You gotta have a family,” he says.

“You’re my family,” Bucky says.

“Great,” Steve says, bone dry. “Then we can both go to prison.”

“You’re not going to prison,” Bucky growls. Just the idea of it, just the word is a fist around Bucky’s heart. “Over my dead body are you going to prison.”

At last Steve turns his head to look at him, his lips pulling back from his teeth in anger. “Don’t say that, Buck. Don’t you dare.”

“Don’t _you_ dare,” Bucky bites back. “You’ve never backed down from a fight in your life, Rogers. You’re sure as hell not backing down from this one.”

Steve stares at him for a moment, breathing out heavy and angry through his nose, and then the corner of his mouth twitches up. “I remember this: the arguing.”

“Then you should remember that I’m always right.”

Steve chuckles, a low, rich sound that warms Bucky to the tips of his fingers. He stares at Bucky, and after a while, he takes a deep breath and says, “Tell me something. Not about you. I remember you. Tell me about-- about me.”

As if they have even a fraction of the time it would take Bucky to tell Steve everything he knows about him. They don’t have enough years left on this earth between them.

The number of freckles on Steve’s back. The fact that he sneezes in threes and snores like a bear all through the winter. The summer of ‘34 when his voice broke. The smell of his skin when he’s aroused.

But seeing Steve now, pale and hiding in the shadows beneath the ceiling rafters, Bucky remembers something he hasn’t thought about in sixty years. “They used to call you ‘iarlais,’” he says. “The Irish gals in the neighborhood - the ones whose families came over during the famine. It means ‘changeling.’

“The way your ma told it, you were four years old the first time you got real sick. Got a cold that turned into croup. And all those old broads showed up at your apartment to tell your ma that the faeries had stolen the real you - the healthy you - and put a changeling in his place. Told her that if you died, the faeries might return the real you.”

Bucky grins, “The longer you lived, the less they liked you. We used to play tricks on them. Mrs. Whelan was the easiest since she lived in a basement apartment. We’d climb in through her window, turn all of her clothes inside out. One time, we moved all her furniture so it was facing the walls--” Bucky looks up then to see Steve gone white as a sheet, his eyes wide with terror.

Maybe this isn’t the best story to tell someone with an uneasy sense of reality.

Bucky curses himself. “Shit. I’m sorry, Steve.”

Steve pulls in a deep, trembling breath and pushes it out as a watery laugh. “That’s alright, but-- You got any happier memories?”

Bucky opens his mouth to speak, closes it again. Most of his memories involve at least one of them doing something stupid and/or kinda violent. “Uh… you’re a good cook. Your ma wasn’t sure how long she’d be around so she started teaching you that stuff early. How to feed yourself. How to get blood and dirt stains out of your shirts. How to darn, stitch, hem. But you could never focus on one thing for long so your stitches always started out neat and then got real messy.”

Apparently, Bucky can’t talk about their past without bringing up someone’s impending death, but when he looks up Steve is smiling softly at him. He pulls his outer sweatshirt over his head, turns it inside out, and points at the hole in the armpit that he’s patched up with white thread. Keeping the hole closed is a simple whip stitch that gradually devolves into uneven criss crosses that eat up big chunks of fabric.

Bucky laughs loud enough that it echoes in the empty space.

Steve smiles at him, small and strangely wistful.

“What about me?” Bucky asks him. “What do you remember about me?”

The smile slides off of Steve’s face, and he turns his head to look out through the ceiling struts again. He stares for so long at nothing that Bucky’s about to ask him what’s wrong.

And then Steve says, still not looking at him. “Your name is James Buchanan Barnes. We met when we were kids. I hit you in the head with a baseball bat. You’d just moved back from Indiana, one of the times your ma tried to leave your dad. You’re the only person who ever touched me because you wanted to, not because I was sick or needed help.”

Bucky blinks against the sudden stinging in his eyes. He wants desperately to touch Steve then, to take his hand, take him home.

That’s when he hears it, the rumble of two armored cars, maybe a hundred yards away.

Bucky leans forward out of his recline, ready to jump to the floor below and run alongside Steve. “Steve. Stevie, we need to leave. _Now_.”

There’s no way that Steve doesn’t hear the car doors opening, the boots on the ground, eight pairs of them. But he doesn’t move, just looks Bucky in the eye and says, his voice calm and steady, “If I didn't turn myself in, they would've come after you.”

Bucky’s heart drops down into his stomach. “ _What_?” The agents are close now, sliding through the plastic sheeting into the construction site.

Steve stands up on the ceiling joist to his full height, says, “Whatever happens, Buck, I need you to know: I remember you. I remember everything about you.” And then he jumps, landing almost silently on the poured concrete below.

The agents swarm in shouting, “Hands up! On your knees!” They don’t have to say it a second time. Steve submits, dropping to his knees and lifting his hands in the air.

“Steve!” Bucky yells and jumps, landing on the back of one of the agents. He wraps his thighs around the agent’s neck and drops his torso. They fall to the ground together; Bucky lands on all fours and the agent lands on his head, writhing and disoriented.

Bucky charges forward and grabs another agent around the torso. Once Bucky gets him on the ground and pinned, he pulls back to punch him-- and freezes when something pierces his left shoulder.

Bucky grabs the dart and pulls it out, but it’s too late. “Did you fucking tranq me?” Bucky slurs as his legs disappear beneath him. He collapses like a rag doll, and one of the agents lunches forward to catch him just before he slams his head on the concrete floor.

The last thing he sees before he passes out is Steve, dart in his neck, roaring Bucky’s name as four agents struggle to get his hands behind his back.


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bucky gets angry, and then he gets revenge.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Extra warning for psychological torture performed by a main character: There is a torture scene in this chapter. See the notes at the end of this chapter for a more detailed description. I have a pretty low threshold for horror and characters doing fucked up things, and writing this didn’t bother me. However, I would suggest that anyone who is triggered by descriptions of psychological or non-graphic physical torture proceed with caution.

_“kneel_  
on the scorched earth  
in the shapes of men and animals _"_

\- "The Dead Shall Be Raised Incorruptible” by Galway Kinnell

 

Bucky comes awake to the sound of Regis Philbin reminding him that he’s still got two of his three lifelines left.

He cracks an eye open to see fiber ceiling tiles and dark blue privacy curtains. A woman takes a deep breath and says in a Midwestern twang, “I’d like to ask the audience.”

To Bucky’s right, a deeper voice mutters, “Walgreens.” Bucky turns his head to see a SHIELD nurse tapping away on a Blackberry, sitting on one chair with his feet up on another.

Two thoughts hit Bucky at once. One: The Greensboro sit-ins happened at Woolworth’s, not Walgreens. Two: SHIELD has Steve.

He sits up and swings his legs over the side of the bed, his head spinning as the world jolts upright around him.

The nurse spots him and scrambles to his feet. “Agent Barnes,” he says, “How are you feeling?”

“Like I just got hit with a tranquilizer dart,” Bucky says, shutting his eyes until the headrush dissipates. “How long was I out for?”

“Almost twenty hours. We, uh… may have overestimated how strong the tranquilizers needed to be to knock you out.”

Panic spikes through Bucky’s chest. “Shit,” he spits, hopping off the bed with the intention of making a break for the door. God knows what trouble Steve could have gotten into in twenty hours.

The nurse takes a step towards him and says, “You’ve got a bruise on your left cheekbone and a split lip,” And then surprisingly, he steps aside, leaving Bucky’s route to the exit clear. “But other than that you’re good to go. You might experience some dizziness or nausea over the next twenty-four hours, but that’s an expected side effect of the tranquilizer.” He nods towards the door. “It’s almost eight o’clock, but Director Hill should still be in her office.”

Bucky stands there dumbly for a second before shaking himself out of his stupor. “Thank you,” he says and then stumbles out the door and to the elevators.

On his way to Hill’s office, Bucky realizes that he’s still wearing his clothes from the night before, a brown stain on the front of his henley where blood dripped on it. He gets a couple of raised eyebrows as he stumbles through the halls, but most everyone at SHIELD has seen weirder.

The instant he bursts into Hill’s waiting room, her assistant is on her feet, hand on the sidearm at her hip. When she recognizes Bucky, she sighs, sits back down in her chair. “We were wondering when you were gonna show up,” she says.

She doesn’t say anything else or move to stop him.

Bucky raises an eyebrow at her. “Well? Aren’t you gonna announce me?”

She looks like she might pull a muscle trying to not roll her eyes. She keeps her eyes on Bucky as she presses the intercom. “Agent Barnes is here to see you,” she says and then gestures with a flourish towards Hill’s office door.

Hill is already standing when Bucky enters her office, her arms crossed over her chest. As soon as the door shuts behind him, she says, “Before you say anything, you should know: He made a deal.”

That stops Bucky in his tracks. “What?”

“He contacted me three days ago,” Hill says. “I don’t know how he got my direct line, but he did. He offered SHIELD information on Russia and Afghanistan, including a man that’s on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list.”

“In exchange for what?” Bucky asks.

Hill picks up her cell phone and tucks it into her pocket. She keeps talking as she steps out from behind her desk. “He wanted us to be the ones to bring him in,” she says. “He didn’t want to talk to anyone at the CIA. And he made us promise him that no one would come after you.”

“That son of a bitch,” Bucky mutters.

Hill approaches the wall to the right of her desk and places her hand on it. A door that wasn’t there a second ago appears. She pushes it open, tilts her head forward. “Come on.” she says.

“Where are we going?”

“To see him,” Hill says, walking through the door.

Bucky dashes forward to slip through it after her, finding himself in a short hallway containing only an elevator entrance.

“Just like that?” Bucky asks, surprised.

“You’re all he’s asked about since he woke up.” The elevator opens, and Bucky follows Hill inside. “Maybe you can get him to talk about something else.”

The elevator clunks shut and slides silently down forty-one stories to the fifth sub-basement, just above ballistic weapons storage and the helicarriers.

Bucky’s only been on this floor once before, when Bruce had an episode and needed to be contained.

The elevator doors open directly onto a control room where two pairs of guards stand sentry over a dozen agents, all of whom have their eyes glued to a bank of monitors. Some of them speak in code into headsets, others click buttons and turn dials to see different views of prisoners’ rooms. Bucky scans each of the monitors as he and Hill walk past, but he doesn’t spot Steve.

Hill leads him into a long corridor lined with heavy, windowless doors. When they come to the last door on the left, Hill nods to the guard and presses her thumb to a keypad. The lock on the door clacks open, and Hill opens it and gestures Bucky inside.

Bucky steps into a viewing room with a large window that looks into what he assumes is Steve’s cell. It resembles a hotel suite with its homey but synthetic decor. The walls are painted a soft yellow that glows with the light from a too-high-wattage floor lamp. Windows that are actually screens present a fake view of the D.C. skyline at night. The furniture looks comfortable but lacks any removable parts. There are no sharp edges or electrical outlets anywhere that Bucky can see.

Even stranger is the apartment’s complete lack of decoration. The walls are unadorned, and the bookshelf against the far right wall of the room is absent any books. Those don’t seem like details that SHIELD would miss or forgo.

Bucky steps up to the window, and an aberration catches the corner of his eye. On one wall of the living room, someone has written in all capital letters, _OPEN THE POD BAY DOORS, HAL._

“Your boy’s got a sense of humor,” Hill says, walking over to stand beside him.

The corner of Bucky’s mouth quirks up. “He’s always been a punk. Where the hell did he get a Sharpie?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Hill sighs, shoulders slumping in disappointment - no doubt in whatever junior agent Steve lifted it off of.

Hill goes on, “He’s already disabled the camera in his bedroom.”

“How do you know it was him?” Bucky asks.

“Right after it went out he started singing this awful song... ‘Let’s Turn Off the Lights’?”

Bucky bites his lip to keep from laughing. “‘Let’s Put Out the Lights,’” he says. “I’m sorry about that. He’s got a terrible singing voice.”

A tall shadow moves through a back room only partially visible from the viewing window, and a voice pitched high with hope calls out, “Buck?”

“Steve,” Bucky calls back, leaning forward in the hopes of catching sight of him, bumping his head against the electromagnetic field separating them.

Steve appears in the doorway just in time to see it and doesn’t even crack a smile. His eyes are red-rimmed and his skin nearly translucent in the bright light of the small room. He ambles toward Bucky, staying close to the walls. He’s still wearing the same clothes he was yesterday.

Once at the viewing window, he catches sight of something on Bucky’s face, and his jaw clenches. It takes Bucky a moment to remember the bruise on his cheek and the cut on his lip.

Steve reaches up as if hoping to touch him before he remembers that he can’t and drops his hand. He leaves it hanging at his hip, opening and clenching futilely. “You alright?” he asks, eyes jumping up and down Bucky’s body in search of further injury.

“Am _I_ alright? They’ve got you locked in a damn cage and you’re asking if _I’m_ alright?.”

Steve shrugs. “It’s not so bad. They’re feeding me plenty.” He gestures behind him. “Even got a nice view of the city.” He rustles up a smile but it’s undercut by the fact that he’s blinking heavily and swaying on his feet.

“When was the last time you slept, Stevie?”

Steve shrugs, more like a twitch of his shoulder. “A couple days ago. I’m fine. I can go without--”

“Spare me the bullshit about what you can go without,” Bucky interrupts. “You need to sleep.”

“Okay, Buck.”

“Just hang tight, okay? I’m gonna get you outta there. I’m gonna get you a lawyer.”

Steve nods. “Alright.”

“You want me to bring you anything?” Bucky asks. “Maybe some charcoals? Sketching paper?”

“Anything as long as it’s not a hundred-piece jigsaw puzzle of the American flag,” Steve says. When Bucky frowns in confusion, Steve clarifies, “I doubt it was put in here on purpose. But you gotta admit, it is kinda funny.”

Bucky’s lip curls in disgust. Somewhere over his left shoulder, Hill interjects, “Almost time for lights-out, Barnes, Captain Rogers.”

Bucky turns his head to look at her, scowls.

“We have to keep him on a strict schedule,” Hill says, ignoring him. “Doctor’s orders.”

“What doctor?” Bucky asks.

“We’ve assigned a psychiatrist to Captain Rogers - Doctor Barton Hamilton. I’ll send you his credentials.” She presses her thumb to a pad next to the door, and once the light flashes green, a guard opens it from the other side.

“I want those credentials tonight,” Bucky says to her before turning back to Steve. He presses his hand against the electromagnetic field. “I’ll be back tomorrow, I promise. Get some sleep.”

Steve places his hand on the opposite side of the barrier and gives him a soft smile. “Sounds good, Buck,” he says, and he stays standing there so long that Bucky has to be the one to walk away first.

-

Normally, the sight of green things growing in the dead of winter would make Bucky smile. But walking through the Warm Temperate Pavilion in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden is making Bucky’s skin crawl. None of this stuff has any business being here, living hundreds of miles from home in a creepy facsimile.

It makes Bucky think of Steve and the Twilight Zone episode he’s currently being kept in.

He spots Natasha, sitting on a bench and half hidden by a leaf as long as she is tall. She’s watching a class of kindergartners as they toddle through the greenhouse, hand in hand in a line of ambling pairs. Her eyes are vacant and her face is drawn and pale. She looks like she’s lost a couple of pounds in the six days Bucky hasn’t seen her.

Bucky sits down next to her on the bench, but leaves some space between them. She’s undoubtedly aware of his presence, and she’ll start talking whenever she’s ready.

After a couple minutes, she turns to him and asks, “Why did you never ask me if I was really an orphan?”

Bucky frowns. “What?”

“After we escaped from Zola’s compound, when I agreed to join SHIELD. Did you ever wonder how I knew how to fight? How to fire a gun?” She’s leaning in close, eyes sharp as they search Bucky’s face, and her voice is low and gravelly, angry maybe. “Didn’t you wonder if I wasn’t who I said I was?”

Bucky stammers, “I mean… yeah, but-- I wasn’t gonna-- You were just a kid.”

Plenty of orphaned children fought in the Red Army. Bucky had no reason not to believe Natasha when she told them that she was taken prisoner during the Siege of Leningrad. And he wasn’t about to grill a twelve-year-old girl on her true allegiances.

Natasha sighs, deflates a bit. She looks across the pavilion at the line of kindergarteners now wandering wide-eyed into the next pavilion, says, “I was working for SMERSH when the Germans captured me in Leningrad.”

It takes Bucky a minute to locate the acronym in a dusty back corner of his mind. SMERSH - Soviet counterintelligence organization, the precursor to the KGB. “You were a spy?”

“I was seven or eight when they recruited me. I think. I don’t know my birthday or what year I was born. I could probably find a record of my birth in the state archives, but… I don’t think my age really matters at this point.”

Bucky’s known her for so long, he often forgets that to everyone else, she looks like a young girl. Her face has aged a couple of years, and she could maybe pass for fifteen or sixteen. She’s sixty-five years old.

“There were twenty-eight of us,” she goes on. “All of us were orphans. SMERSH took us in, gave us beds to sleep in, hot food. They gave us a home and a future.”

She looks down at her hands where they’re clasped between her knees and continues, “You can make anyone do anything if they’re desperate enough. There were a lot of desperate people in Russia then. The Soviet secret police were using mobile gas chambers. They were rounding up entire ethnic groups and marching them into Siberia.

“I was starving. I might have betrayed my own family if it meant I could eat. Maybe I did. I don’t remember much from the time before SMERSH recruited me.”

She looks back up at him then, not saying anything more, as if she’s waiting for Bucky to pass judgement on her.

Bucky doesn’t know what to say but finally settles on, “Thank you for telling me.” It obviously took a lot out of her. Bucky is touched (and a little surprised) that Natasha would share her past with him, but he wonders: “Why are you telling me this now?”

“Because you deserve to know the truth,” Natasha says, her eyes wide and - if he didn’t know her better - scared. She takes a deep breath, looks back down at her hands, and says, “I could have saved Steve.”

Static crackles in Bucky’s brain. “What?”

“I was the last person to see him before Zola got to him. I could have saved him.”

A reel of full color images flash through Bucky’s mind - of Natasha picking Steve up and then dropping him when he slowed her down, of Natasha ignoring Steve’s screams as she passed by the door of his cell.

Bucky hisses at her, “If you could have saved him, why didn’t you?”

“I don’t know,” Natasha says, breathless. “He was sitting in the middle of the hallway. I was at one end of it and Zola and his men were at the other. I might have been able to get to Steve before they did. But he told me to get out, told me to leave him.” She squints down at her hands. “So I did. I don’t know why.”

The turmoil in Bucky’s chest subsides, and he’s finally able to take a breath. “You ran because Steve Rogers is impossible to say no to,” he says. He shakes his head, smiles down at his knees. “Nat, I love Steve. I love him more than my own worthless life. But there’s no changing his mind once he’s made a decision. You did the smart thing: You saved yourself. If you hadn’t, Zola would have taken you both.”

“So you don’t feel guilty that you escaped and he didn’t?” Natasha asks.

“Of course, I feel guilty. I feel guilty every damn day. The one time when it really mattered whether or not I was there for him, and I wasn’t.” Bucky takes a deep breath, reaches around to scratch his stump. “You know the week we moved in together he stepped into the middle of a knife fight? Fucking idiot almost got himself cut open. He came home with a three-inch-long slice across his belly. I was hysterical. I damn near locked him in our apartment just so he wouldn’t leave my sight again. But you gotta let a man fight his own battles, right? Even if you love him?”

Natasha shrugs. “I don’t know. I’ve never been in love.”

Bucky rakes a hand through his hair. “Can’t say I recommend it. It eats you alive.”

Natasha stares at him, silent. After a moment, she stands, pulling a leather satchel out from beneath the bench and sliding the strap over her shoulder. She tilts her head toward the greenhouse exit. “Let’s take a walk. I have something to show you.”

Bucky follows a few yards behind her as she leads him up a concrete path, through thickets of bare, twisted trees, to an iced-over pond surrounded by towering evergreens. A red _torii_ sits in the middle of it, vivid against the slate grey water and sky. It’s almost eerily silent, too cold outside for most people to be taking a stroll.

Natasha leads him into a small, roofed pavilion at the water’s edge and sits down on one of the benches facing the pond. She opens her satchel and pulls out an old-fashioned expanding folder, hands it to Bucky.

There are no identifying labels on it of any kind, but its weight and the look Natasha is giving him tell him what it is. He sits down on the bench and crosses his ankle over his knee to give himself a surface to lay it on. He opens the folder and pulls out a stack of paper almost two inches thick.

The first fifty or so pages are the same documents Sam gave him, detailing Steve’s capture and torture by the Soviets.

And then, about halfway through the stack, Bucky catches sight of the United States Central Intelligence Agency seal, unmistakable in the top left corner of a page.

Bucky’s blood freezes in his veins. He flips quickly through the next few pages, taking in the dates and the signatures. He doesn’t want to believe it, but the proof is right here: These are MKUltra files.

And in them are all the names that were missing from the documents Sam gave him: Doctor Donald Ewen Cameron, Doctor Harris Isbell, and Doctor William Stryker.

Most of the pages are documentation of Stryker’s experiments, and his work covers the longest span of time, starting in 1964 and going all the way to 1976.

Horror after horror jumps off the pages as Bucky leafs through them.

_Due to his enhancement, subject will be administered electroconvulsive therapy at forty times the usual voltage._

_Subject fell into a coma following the administration of .5 mg of curare._

_While attempting to interrogate the subject after he woke from coma, it was found that he had temporarily lost the ability to speak._

_Subject informed Doctor Stryker that he wanted to see his mother._

_Subject asked the nurse if she was his mother._

Intermixed with daily logs of Steve’s ‘treatment’ are briefings that were submitted to the White House for approval, spanning over a decade and signed by no fewer than seven Directors of Central Intelligence. Men that Bucky made small talk with at dinner parties. Men he shook hands with at intelligence community gatherings.

Bucky wonders how high up this knowledge went, how many Presidents knew about it. If Fury knew about it.

Bucky’s legs go numb, and the stack of documents fall to the floor of the pavilion. He curls forward over his knees as his stomach clenches. He’s going to vomit.

Natasha picks up the stack of documents and puts them back in the folder where they’ll be safe. She puts her hand on Bucky’s back and gently rubs up and down his spine as he gets his breathing under control.

“I’m going to kill him,” Bucky says.

“Who?” Natasha asks. It’s a fair question, because really Bucky wants to kill all of them. Every person who ever heard so much as a rumor about what was being done to Steve and did nothing to stop it.

But there’s one man that deserves it more than any of them. The man who did the most and the worst and escaped Steve’s revenge simply through serendipitous timing.

“Stryker,” Bucky says. “I’m gonna kill Stryker.”

-

The room’s too big. Steve can hear his own movements echo off the walls now that he’s cleared them, taken down the paintings and the clocks and shoved them beneath his bed, along with the books from the shelves.

It’s easier this way, ess sensory input. Even the bed with its multiple sheets and pillows is overwhelming. He’s shoved it into the corner so that it’s only open on two sides, but there’s still so much… room.

He pushes himself up onto wobbly legs, pulls a quilt off the bed, and drags it into the bathroom. He tosses it into the bathtub and crawls in after it, curls up in the basin as small as he can. This is better, four solid walls close around him. He doesn’t even have to turn his head to see the door; it’s right there in front of him. One way in and one way out. Simple.

He closes his eyes and tries to remove himself, from this place and hopefully from existence entirely.

He’s lost entire blessed days to this, curled up in a safe place out of the cold - an open bulkhead, the basement of an abandoned home. It’s useful when he would otherwise spend entire days gripped by physical pain or hunger or panic attacks. It’s a substitute for sleep when it won’t come or when he can’t risk a nightmare. If he holds still for long enough, and is quiet enough, he can feel himself start to dissolve around the edges.

The deep, warm bass of Bucky’s voice weaves between his thoughts and pulls him back to the present. “Steve?” he calls. “Stevie, you there?”

“Buck,” he rasps. He wants more than anything to stand up and go to him, but he’s so tired, his bones made of lead.

He opens his eyes, and suddenly Bucky is right in front of him. Steve looks down at his feet to find himself standing, looks back over his shoulder at the room he just came from.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t make it back here yesterday,” Bucky is saying. “I brought a lawyer with me, though, a real good one. She’s setting up a meeting with SHIELD’s legal team right now. We’re gonna get you out of here, find a place for you, somewhere safe.”

“I’m not safe in here?” Steve asks.

Bucky frowns. “Of course you are, Stevie. I just thought you’d rather live in a real apartment.” Bucky gives him a small smile. “Someplace not underground, you know?”

What the hell would Steve do with a real apartment? How would he pay for it? What would he put in it? “Whatever you think is best, Buck,” he says.

The smile drops off of Bucky’s face. “What do you think is best, Steve?”

Steve shrugs. “SHIELD needs to know what I know. Once I’ve told them that, it doesn’t really matter what happens to me.”

“You don’t have to tell them anything,” Bucky says, emphatic. “Bernie says your offer isn’t legally binding--”

“If I don’t tell them, then people are gonna die, Buck. Innocent people--”

“You’re innocent, too,” Bucky says, clenching his jaw.

“None of us are innocent,” Steve snarls, stepping right up to the invisible shield, almost nose-to-nose with Bucky. “You remember the barracks bombings in ‘83? When Hezbollah killed over two hundred Marines? You know why they did that, don’t you?”

“Stevie, what are you--”

“Because we bombed apartment buildings in Beirut. Buildings like the ones you and me grew up in. The places where their families lived. _Their homes_.” An emotion that Steve can’t name solidifies in his throat, squeezing his larynx and making it difficult to speak and breathe at the same time. “We gave Israel tanks and bombs and they used them to kill five thousand people.  _Civilians_.” Steve’s breath hitches; he can’t seem to pull enough air into his lungs.

“Steve,” Bucky is saying, pleading, his hand pressed against the invisible shield now. “Stevie, you need to breathe, sweetheart.”

But Steve finally has someone to tell and he can’t stop talking. “This is how we fight now, Buck. We bomb the places where families live. We kill children,” he chokes, rage (That’s it. That’s what he’s feeling.) clawing its way up his throat. And then it wraps its fingers around Steve’s brain and squeezes.

Luckily, he’s learned to read the signs. He sits and then lays down on the floor just as the world tilts around him, his spine curls, and his body starts to convulse.

“Stevie, what’s going on? Steve? Steve!” Bucky screaming is the last thing he hears before the world goes blessedly dark.

-

Doctor Barton Hamilton is - according to the credentials Hill emailed to Bucky last night - a completely legitimate psychiatrist and beyond qualified to be Steve’s doctor.

Doesn’t mean Bucky trusts him.

Dr. Hamilton is huddled up with the SHIELD doctor that’s treating Steve, down the hall from the room where they’re keeping him. They’re speaking in hushed tones about how to treat a non-epileptic seizure.

Bucky is trying to give them their space, to let them do what they’re trained to do. Granted, pacing less than ten yards away clenching his hand into a fist, Bucky isn’t exactly radiating trust.

And then the word “antipsychotic” comes out of Doctor Barton Hamilton’s mouth, and Bucky is striding down the hallway toward them. God save him from doctors. If he never has to speak to another again one for as long as he lives, he’ll die a happy man.

“What the hell would you put him on antipsychotics for?” Bucky butts in, causing both of the men to jump back, startled.

The SHIELD doctor looks over at Dr. Hamilton for help. Dr. Hamilton sighs, says, “Anti-psychotics are being used more and more to treat complex PTSD, which Captain Rogers is almost certainly suffering from. He’s experiencing dissociative episodes, lacking affect, he’s quick to anger--”

“Of course he’s quick to anger,” Bucky interjects. “He’s Steve Rogers.”

“Agent Barnes,” Dr. Hamilton says, scolding.

Bucky sighs. There’s enough disturbing shit going on in Steve’s head right now that he can’t imagine how adding drugs to the equation would help. “He’s had his head messed with enough,” he says. “Can’t we just let him rest for a while?”

The SHIELD doctor speaks up, “That’s part of the problem, Agent Barnes. He doesn’t want to take any medication, including medication that would help him sleep. And his insomnia is exacerbating his symptoms, including his paranoia.”

“Well, you’ll just have to work around that, won’t you? It’s his right to refuse medication.”

“But it could be  _your_ right,” Dr. Hamilton says. “No one would fault you for thinking Captain Rogers is incapable of deciding what’s best for himself in his current state. I suspect he would have no problem signing his power of attorney over to you.”

Bucky’s met a lot of doctors in his time, some that he would trust with his life and a couple that he should have reported for unethical practices. He’s not yet sure which category these two men fall into. So he gives them a flat smile and a nod that betrays nothing and asks, “Can I see him now?”

-

Steve’s racing heart jolts him back into consciousness. He must have been in a threshold state; he wouldn’t have fallen asleep here, in this hospital bed that’s open on three sides.

The sheets under his back are soaking, and his head is pounding. His eyes pull focus on a cup of water on the tray in front of him. He reaches for it, but his arm is shaking so badly that he knocks it over, spilling its contents onto the floor.

The figure sitting next to the bed stands up, and Steve flinches, causing the person to take a step back. It’s a young woman in a red pantsuit, kinky brown hair pulled back into a bun. She’s wearing minimal makeup but still looks incredibly put together for someone who’s been sitting next to a hospital bed.

She gives Steve a warm smile and says, in a faint Brooklyn accent, “Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you.” She snatches the empty cup off the tray, pours some more water into it, and hands it to Steve. “Here you go,” she says.

Steve takes the cup, rasps, “Thanks.” He uses both hands to tip it into his mouth and drains its contents in two gulps.

He hands the cup back to her, and they repeat the process three more times before Steve’s throat opens up enough that he can speak. By that time he’s figured out who she is. “You’re the lawyer Bucky was talking about,” he says.

“Well, I’m sure not wearing this pantsuit because it’s comfortable.” She holds out her hand for Steve to shake. “Bernie Rosenthal. Sorry to bother you when you’re supposed to be resting, but I wanted to get you alone. Not easy with Agent Barnes always hovering over your shoulder.” She smiles at that, and Steve mimics the expression, wanting her to feel at ease.

She seems to pick up on Steve’s pretense, says, “Feel free to tell me to get lost.”

“Bucky wouldn’t like that.”

“While I do appreciate Agent Barnes’ business, I’m not his lawyer - I’m yours.”

Steve gives her as real a smile as he can muster and nods at the chair next to the bed, hoping she’ll get the hint without him needing to move his head too much.

She pulls the chair up next to him and sits down.

“SHIELD knows that you have council now. Once you’re feeling up to it, we can discuss what you need from them in order to ensure you remember everything correctly. But in the meantime, I need to be sure they’re treating you humanely.”

There’s a long silence before Steve realizes she’s indirectly asked him a question.

He clears his throat. “I’m fine.”

“Do you feel safe where they’re currently holding you?”

Steve doesn’t feel safe anywhere. “I do.”

“Can you think of anything you need that you’re not getting? Water? Food? Medicine?”

“I’d like to tell SHIELD what I know. As soon as possible,” Steve insists for what feels like the hundredth time.

Ms. Rosenthal frowns. “Of course,” she says. “But besides that, is there anything else you need?”

It might be nice to see the sun, to breathe fresh air. But the thought of going back outside - where there are no walls to hold him in, no doorways to filter threats - causes Steve’s heart and his mind race.

And asking to see the sun just sounds pathetic.

“Is Bucky safe?” he asks, the only other thing he can think of.

Ms. Rosenthal smiles and nods, seeming to understand. “Agent Barnes is fine.”

“Then I’m fine,” Steve says. He’s ready for this conversation to be over. He can feel another headache coming on. “Will you let me know when I can talk to someone at SHIELD? Preferably someone from Intelligence Collection?”

“Of course, Captain Rogers.” She stands and picks up her briefcase, puts it on her chair so she can look inside. “I’ll leave you to get some rest, but first I need you to sign a couple of forms.” She places the documents on Steve’s tray and rolls it towards him.

Steve scans the documents as quickly as he can - blinking hard to keep his eyes open and focused - and signs on the lines Ms. Rosenthal has marked with little yellow pieces of paper. He’s handing the documents back to her when the door opens, and Bucky pokes his head in. He looks immediately at Steve and asks him, “Everything alright?”

Steve smiles, something in him relaxing at Bucky’s presence, “Yeah, Buck.”

Bucky nods and looks over at Ms. Rosenthal. He grins, all teeth, and says, “If it isn’t Brooklyn’s most talented glass blower.”

Ms. Rosenthal smirks and doesn’t look up at him. “And if it isn’t-- What did they call you in the Avengers cartoon? The Winter Soldier?”

Bucky’s grin freezes, suddenly brittle. “That’s cold, Bernie.”

Ms. Rosenthal shakes her head and clicks her briefcase shut. “Should have seen that one coming, Barnes.”

Bucky chuckles and steps into the room. He pulls a chair up to the side of Steve’s bed and sits down. “You should feel honored, Steve. Bernie here is a bonafide fine artist.”

“Former bonafide fine artist,” Ms. Rosenthal says.

“Bernie makes the rest of us schlubs look bad. She’s got a permanent installation at the Brooklyn Museum. She’s argued several cases in front of the Virginia Supreme Court. And she could probably kick your ass in handball,” Bucky says.

“I can definitely kick _his_ ass,” Ms. Rosenthal says, nodding at Bucky. She picks up her briefcase and tucks her coat into the crook of her elbow. “Captain Rogers, it’s been a pleasure. I’ll be in touch in a couple of days, once the meeting date with SHIELD is finalized.” She hands Steve her business card. “Please keep this on you at all times. And don’t hesitate to call me if you need anything.” She nods at Bucky. “And don’t let this guy give you any legal advice. I know he’s prettier than I am, but I’m the one with the degree.”

Steve nods. “Thank you, Ms. Rosenthal.”

“Call me Bernie,” she says, reaching out to give Steve’s hand a firm shake. She gives Bucky a condescending pat on the head as she walks past him on her way out the door. “Barnes,” she says over her shoulder.

“Ms. Rosenthal,” Bucky says.

As soon as she’s shut the door behind her, Bucky shifts his chair forward and takes Steve’s hand in his. “You can trust Bernie,” he says. “She’s represented more than a few Enhanced and mutants. She knows how to handle SHIELD.” He massages the pressure points in Steve’s left hand as he speaks.

Bucky used to do this back when they lived together, when Steve’s hand would cramp up after hours of drawing. It used to drive Steve wild, usually ended with him climbing into Bucky’s lap and grinding on him. Now, Steve feels only a faint warmth, the memory of a much stronger emotion.

“You feeling okay?” Bucky asks him.

“I’m fine.”

Bucky frowns. “That happened to you before? The seizures?”

“Yeah. A few times. I get--” Steve thinks of how best to describe the constant burn inside his chest, the way it immolates everything he tries to tamp it down with. “I get angry. And it was easier to deal with when I was out there.” He nods to the world outside the window. “When I didn’t have to talk to anybody, when I had a plan that I was working on.”

Bucky nods. “Sounds like coming home from war,” he says.

And yeah, it’s a little like that-- but not really. Bucky will try, but he’ll never really understand what Steve’s been through, the world he’s forced to inhabit now, alone.

Steve gives him a nod and changes the subject. “So, how do you know Ms. Rosen-- Bernie?” he asks Bucky.

Bucky smiles as he moves his fingers to Steve’s knuckles, cracking each one in turn. “You remember Joanne and Larry Chisholm? They lived across State street from us. You could see into their apartment from ours. Larry used to beat on Joanne. You were always calling the cops on him. They’d tell you to mind your own business and hang up on you. And then one day the cops finally showed up, along with an ambulance--”

“Because Joanne finally threw that sack of shit through their interior window,” Steve says, the sights and sounds of that day suddenly vivid in his memory. The sound of shattering glass and a horrifying scream echoing down the street, stopping everyone in their tracks. A bag of groceries slipping out of Mrs. Lee’s arms. Mickey Mullins dropping the stick they were using as a baseball bat. Everyone on the street looking up, searching for the source of the sound.

When the cops pulled Larry Chisholm - kicking and screaming and bleeding from his left eye - out of his building, the grown ups stayed inside or watched from their stoops. But the kids were in the street, cheering and clapping as they shoved Larry into the ambulance and slammed the door behind him.

“Didn’t Joanne get locked up for that?” Steve asks Bucky.

“For two years, yeah. But Larry got put away a year into her sentence - he almost killed a cop in a bar fight.

“Joanne still lost custody of Robby and Mariam, though. They went to live with her sister - Maya Rosenthal.”

Steve does some quick math in his head. “Bernie is Joanne’s great-granddaughter?”

Bucky smiles and nods. “The family never left Brooklyn. Bernie lives just down the street from me in Park Slope.”

“Small world,” Steve says.

“Small world,” Bucky agrees. His hand pauses when it’s stroking Steve’s fingers. He rubs at the spot between Steve’s second and third knuckle on his middle finger. “You used to have a callus here. I figured you’d have it forever, ‘til we were old and grey. I used to worry about you getting arthritis. You used to grip your pencil so hard you’d emboss the paper.” His hand drifts down to the skin at the base of Steve’s thumb and forefinger, the gun calluses that have been there for decades now. “You always were a fighter,” Bucky murmurs.

“I don’t think I know how to do anything else anymore,” Steve says.

Bucky nods. “Yeah. Me neither.”

Steve wonders how many years it would take for him and Bucky to tell each other everything they’ve done, everything they’ve seen.

“What was it like over there?” Steve asks Bucky. “Not in Europe. In Vietnam.”

Bucky sighs, his grip on Steve’s hand loosening. “It was endless. Sometimes I forget it’s not still happening. My unit, most of them were good people. But we were lucky. We were there at the beginning. The stuff that happened later, the shit some of those kids did-- The soldiers their COs turned them into--” Bucky’s lips flatten into a tight line and his jaw clenches. He doesn’t go into more detail, but he doesn’t have to.

Steve offers his own story, “My unit was in southwest Afghanistan near the end of the war - ‘87 or ‘88? We were clearing a qalat outside of Gereshk. We missed out target. He’d already left with his wife and kids, but his extended family was still there.

“There was a little girl living on the ground floor with her family. She looked like she was thirteen or fourteen, but she was probably younger - maybe nine or ten. You know the way kids age quicker in war zones, the things they see.

“She’d been shot a few days before. Could have been the Afghan Army or the Marines. She was probably just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“The wound wasn’t fatal, but it was infected. We tried to organize an extraction, but her mother refused to let her go. She told our translator that she knew what happened to girls that were taken away, that the American soldiers would rape and kill her.

“Some of the guys got real offended, thought she was making it up. But when she said it I knew that she was telling the truth.”

“Did that happen over there?” Bucky asks him, jaw clenched in anger but not looking particularly surprised.

“If it happened in Vietnam, then it happened in Afghanistan,” Steve says.

Bucky opens his mouth, probably to try and appease Steve’s guilt. Steve speaks up before he can, “People in Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq - they hate us and they have every reason to. And we deserve everything that’s coming to us.”

Bucky is eyeing him warily. He lets go of Steve’s hand and leans back in his chair. “What’s coming to us, Steve?”

Steve’s not entirely sure, but what else could it be except, “Another goddamn war.”

Bucky folds his arm in front of his chest, scratches his stump. “Wars don’t even end anymore, do they? They just change locations.”

“Once you start fighting it’s hard to stop.”

Bucky smirks. “And you won’t stop fighting until you’re dead.”

“Buck, I _am_ dead,” Steve says, and is caught off guard when Bucky’s face drains of color.

“What do you mean?” Bucky asks him.

Steve sighs. “Buck, any idiot can destroy something that someone else spent half their life creating. Any animal can inflict pain on another. All I want to do anymore is hurt people, and I can’t build a life on that. Just the idea of trying to live a normal life-- It scares the shit out of me.”

Bucky is breathing heavy and his eyes are red-rimmed. “Steve--”

“I heard you talking to Dr. Hamilton in the hall,” Steve says. “He said he might have something to help me sleep?” He doesn’t have the energy to fight with Bucky about this right now. The post-seizure drowsiness is finally over-taking him, but he knows that without drugs the only rest awaiting him is a nightmare-filled fugue state. He just wants to sleep, would be fine with never opening his eyes again.

Bucky swipes his hand beneath his nose and sits up in his chair. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m sure he has something he can give you. But Steve, are you sure? After everything--”

“I also heard him talking to you about taking over my power of attorney,” Steve says. “Which I would recommend you do, except that I think you’d do everything in your power to keep men like him away from me.”

“You’re damn right I would,” Bucky growls.

Steve sighs. “Buck, I don’t have the energy to fight with you about this anymore. I just want to sleep.”

Bucky takes a deep breath, clenches and unclenches his fist.

Steve presses the call button. Once he’s spoken to the nurse and she’s left to find Dr. Hamilton, Steve asks Bucky, “Will you stay with me?”

Bucky nods and reaches forward to take Steve’s hand again.

Dr. Hamilton comes in with three little white pills for Steve to swallow, and Bucky stays with him while they wait for them to take effect. Neither of them speak. Steve holds Bucky’s hand, squeezing it in reassurance until he falls asleep.

-

Dr. William Stryker’s mission-style home in the hills above San Rafael resembles a priory. It’s exposed wood beams, and high, white stucco walls invite reflection and temperance. Small collections of crosses adorn the walls. The pictures of his kids and grandkids, even his degrees and awards are given subordinate display on a low table in the living room.

The house is dark and silent, no one in it save for Stryker and Bucky. It’s fitting that Stryker should find himself living alone at this stage in his life - when he’s ageing and his health is deteriorating - since he worked his entire life to isolate the ill from broader society.

From 1957 to 1976, patients walked into Stryker’s office thinking they were going to be treated for postpartum depression, anxiety, PTSD, even erectile dysfunction. Instead Dr. Stryker used them as human subjects to test the effects of mescaline, LSD, amphetamines, and various paralytic drugs. They were administered electroconvulsive therapy until they didn’t know who or where they were. They were put into drug-induced comas for weeks at a time (three months in one case).

Among the various paralytic drugs Stryker used was an arrow poison commonly known as curare. Bucky wanted to use it for the sake of poetic justice until Natasha pointed out that it can only be administered via injection.

Tetrodotoxin, on the other hand, can be inhaled, ingested, or simply exposed to a mucous membrane.

Once Natasha was able to obtain a low-dosage, powdered solution (from where she wouldn’t say), it was easy for Bucky to deposit it into Stryker’s showerhead.

Stryker’s housekeeper showed up this morning to find him collapsed on top of his bed, paralyzed, his eyes half open. He could part his lips enough to breathe out a weak rasp, but couldn’t speak. Unable to figure out what was wrong with him, the housekeeper called Stryker’s son who called Stryker’s personal physician, Dr. Claremont.

Dr. Claremont hasn’t been able to figure out what’s wrong with him either, and neither have the two physicians Dr. Claremont has called.

But Stryker knows exactly what’s happening to him.

He knows that he’s somehow been exposed to a neurotoxin that’s paralyzing his nervous system. He knows that he has approximately six hours left to live. He knows that he will die of suffocation when his respiratory muscles fail. And he knows that he will be completely lucid until just before he dies, just as he is completely lucid right now.

Bucky’s remotely disabled Stryker’s security system and cameras. Stryker’s housekeeper, Kalinda, is outside on her phone, making her weekly call to her sister in Villa Nueva. Dr. Claremont is in the lab running tests. And Stryker’s son is still on a flight up from L.A.  

All this intel and planning just so Bucky could be here to watch Stryker suffer. He could have hacked into Stryker’s security cameras, but watching it on a screen just wouldn’t have been the same.

It’s satisfying to watch as Stryker realizes there’s a stranger in his home, standing in the shadows at the edge of his bedroom. His eyes widen a fraction, his heart rate monitor beeps urgently, and his mouth flaps open and shut like a fish, trying to call for help. His head tics to the side in an attempt to catch sight of his uninvited guest, but without his glasses, the most he’ll be able to see is a tall, dark-haired figure.

Bucky had a whole speech prepared and everything, like a villain in a James Bond movie. But Stryker doesn’t have to know who is doing this or why. Bucky would rather Stryker use his imagination. He wants Stryker to remember this pain, this terror. He wants it to rattle around inside Stryker’s head every day until the day he dies.

In a few minutes, Bucky will leave out the back door, the same way he came in. There will be no evidence or eyewitnesses to say he was ever here. Tomorrow, Natasha will leak the records of Stryker’s experiments to the press. Once that happens, McGill University will very publicly let Stryker go without a pension. Stryker’s career will be over, and his name will be a dirty word. Most importantly, Bucky will possess a memory that he can carry with him always, like something precious.

Bucky's done a lot of shit he's not proud of, that he wishes he could forget. But watching Stryker piss himself with fear is not one of those things.

-

Once Steve makes good on his promise to tell SHIELD everything he knows, they offer him a room in one of their facilities in upstate New York. It’s sort of like a halfway house for the Enhanced and other powereds. It’s supposed to be nice. A sprawling glass compound in a valley in the Catskills.

Steve tells Bucky about it over lunch in the SHIELD cafeteria. It’s all Bucky can do to swallow the bite of sandwich he’s just taken. Steve hasn’t touched his. The medication that Dr. Hamilton has him on is messing with his stomach. At least he hasn’t had any more seizures and is generally a lot calmer. His passivity is a bit unnerving if Bucky’s being honest.

“You... you can always stay with me, you know,” Bucky says. “If you want.”

“Dr. Hamilton thinks the SHIELD facility would be good for me,” Steve says.

Bucky’s starting to get real sick of hearing that phrase. “That doesn’t mean you have to go,” he says.

Steve nods down at his untouched sandwich. “Yeah… But I think I should.”

Due to Bucky’s reluctance, Steve never signed his power of attorney over to him, so where Steve goes next is completely his decision. But Bucky knows that Steve will do whatever Dr. Hamilton wants him to do.

Bucky visits him at least once a week. Sometimes they sit outside in the sun and chat, sometimes they sit in Steve’s room and Bucky can barely get a word out of him.

One day, at the end of winter, Steve and Bucky are sitting on a bench overlooking a small pond. The grass surrounding it is still flat and gray; the cherry trees haven’t started blooming yet. The only signs of life are two swans gliding across the pond and a couple of turtles suspended in the water, nostrils poking above the surface.

It’s one of Steve’s quiet days. He’s present, answering Bucky’s questions and noticing things around him, but he’s obviously got something on his mind. He’s got a rubber band around his left wrist that he keeps plucking, letting it snap back against the sensitive skin.

Bucky flinches every time he does it. “Is this part of your therapy? ‘Cause I gotta tell you: I’m not a fan.”

Steve frowns at Bucky in confusion. Bucky nods at his wrist, and Steve looks down at the vivid red line forming on his skin.

Steve rubs his thumb across it, says, “It helps when I have bad thoughts.”

Bucky’s heart thumps in his chest. “What kinda bad thoughts?”

“Not about suicide, if that’s what you’re thinking. Not that it hasn’t crossed my mind but-- Dr. Hamilton and I have been talking about how I can control my thoughts better. What’s beneficial for me to think about and what’s not. What thoughts I need to avoid.”

“What kind of thoughts are you trying to avoid?”

Steve takes a deep breath, and looks out across the water. He’s silent for so long that Bucky thinks maybe Steve just won’t answer him. And then he says, “I was proud when Zola picked me. No one ever picked me for anything, but he did. Out of hundreds of men, I was his favorite.”

It makes complete sense, but it still makes Bucky’s guts clench in horror.

“I was an Olympic athlete. Did you know that? I won two silver medals for boxing. I was proud to be Russian. When Yuri Gagarin went into space, I cried right along with everyone else. Sometimes I wonder if I should have stayed in Russia, if I could have been happy there.”

Steve turns to face him then, and Bucky doesn’t have time to school his expression into something a little less dismayed. Steve’s face falls when he sees it, and he stands up and shoves his hands into his pockets. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I told you that.”

“It’s okay,” Bucky says, but he’s still trying to figure out how he feels about what Steve just told him.

“I should get back. I have an appointment with my physical therapist at four.”

“Shit, Stevie, I’m sorry. You know you can tell me anything. You know I’ll never think less of you. It’s just-- kind of a shock.”

Steve toes at the soggy grass, says, “Maybe you should think less of me.”

Bucky shakes his head. “You’re not getting rid of me that easily, pal,” he says, trying to infuse the moment with some levity.

Steve doesn’t even crack a smile, stays looking at the ground when he says, “I think I need some time to think about everything… alone. Can you give me that? Maybe wait a couple weeks to come back?”

The words are a stab to his heart, but Bucky nods and says, “Yeah. Yeah, Stevie I can do that.”

“Thanks, Buck,” Steve says, mustering up a small smile but still not looking up. He turns and walks back to the compound.

Bucky comes back two weeks later, but the nurse on duty informs him that Steve isn’t accepting any visitors. He tries again two weeks after that with the same result. After extracting a promise from the nurse that Steve is doing okay, Bucky turns around and drives right back to the city, blinking back tears as he pulls onto 87.

Sometime around Poughkeepsie the tears morph into joyous laughter. Steve’s made a decision, and he’s sticking to it. Not because Bucky or Dr. Hamilton told him to.

It’s the first time Steve’s done anything for himself since he came back. And if what Steve wants is to not see Bucky, he’ll respect that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As payback for his experiments on Steve, Bucky temporarily immobilizes Stryker using the same drugs that he used on Steve. Stryker is conscious and aware of what Bucky is doing to him, but can’t stop it due to his being paralyzed. Except for temporarily paralyzing him, Bucky does not injure Stryker physically.


End file.
